An architecture for self-managing evolvable assembly systems

Agile manufacturing requires high responsiveness at all levels of a company, but is especially challenging on the shop-floor level. Evolvable Assembly Systems (EAS) are a solution: agentified modules can be seamlessly integrated into existing systems, or removed at any instant. EAS offer a more flexible solution to automation production, but many system design and integration tasks are still done manually. Our goal is to make EAS increasingly self-managing: 1) to easily and quickly produce a new or re-configured assembly system each time a new product order arrives or each time a failure or weakness arises in the current assembly system and 2) to maintain production also under degraded conditions. This article describes an architecture for self-managing evolvable assembly systems. It involves on-the-fly self-assembly of robotic modules, dynamic coordination of tasks and self-adaptation to production conditions, mainly self-healing and self-optimisation. The architecture exploits self-description of modules, monitored modules behaviour and dynamic policies.