Genetics and intelligence: new approaches in production engineering

Abstract

Parts which inherently store data about their fabrication and find their own way through the production, or, machine components that autonomously monitor themselves and arrange inspections as required may still sound like a vision of the future. Nonetheless, in the Collaborative Research Centre 653 'Gentelligent Components in their Lifecycle-Utilisation of Inheritable Component Information in Production Engineering' they will soon be a reality. Transferring characteristics that are similar to those found in nature to industrial production will lead to a paradigm shift in the development and manufacturing of prospective components. This paper presents the techniques and methods that enable this new approach in production engineering by transferring biological principles from the field of genetics into the manufacturing environment.

An autonomous manufacturing system based on swarm of cognitive agents

“…The flexibility of the FMS can be improved using the agent technology [6][7][8] or the cognitive technology [5,9,10] in order to adapt to the changes of the manufacturing environment. In the literature, many novel paradigms that are known as Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) were proposed such as holonic [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19], cognitive [20][21][22][23][24], biological [25][26][27], and reconfigurable manufacturing systems [28,29]. The model of these systems is inherited from the organization of the living systems in biology and nature.…”

Optimizing the order processing of customized products using product configuration

“…In particular, PDM systems were created in order to support interfaces between different departments of a company. While the PDM is mainly meant to manage engineering product data, the product configuration system supports sales processes and connects them to the engineering and the production [1,18,19].…”

Linking total costs and benefits of ownership (TCBO) and process chain simulation for integrated assessment of manufacturing technologies and processes

“…The determination of these Total Costs of Ownership (TCO) has recently become increasingly important in production engineering research activities [28][29][30][31]. Nevertheless, present methods of life-cycle costing are not suitable to realistically quantify future cost and benefits caused by technological investment decisions.…”