1

Advanced Manufacturing:An Industrial Application for

Collective Adaptive Systems

David Sanderson, Nikolas Antzoulatos, Jack Chaplin, DídacBusquets, Jeremy Pitt, Carl German, Alan Norbury, Emma

Kelly, Svetan Ratchev

Introduction

• Manufacturing industry trends and drivers

– Investigation of smart, flexible, adaptive manufacturing lines

• Concrete case study of advanced manufacturing

• Challenges related to general CAS problems

– Advanced Manufacturing as a CAS scenario

• Current research

• Key issues: applicability, implementation, adoption

2

Case Study

• Real world manufacturing

plant

– Part of Siemens “digital factory”

division

– High-volume producer of

electronic drives for motor

control

– Wide range of variants in three

main streams

• Market trend to “batch-size-

of-one”

• Complex system of systems

Comparison to CAS

CAS Feature Manufacturing System

Comprised of many units Often very large

Heterogeneous units Machines, systems, humans, stakeholders

Potentially conflicting properties Maintenance, different stakeholder aims

Different temporal/spatial scales System of systems

Distributed, dispersed decision-making Distributed control, distributed organisation

Interaction and emergence Distributed control, directed emergence

Open systems Failure/repair, organisational change

Fluid boundaries Organisational change, line change

3

RESEARCH CHALLENGES

Optimum System Morphology

• Optimality in open systems not straight-forward

– Definition of optimality

• Multi-criteria optimisation

• Physical topological optimisation as well as “management

optimisation”

– Space constraints

– Resource flow

– Supply chain

• Approaches: MDPs, agent-based planning, discrete constraint

optimisation, holonics, self-organising networks, etc

4

Distributed Hierarchical Decision-

Making

• Too: fast, frequent, complex

• “Human-in-the-loop”

• Socio-technical research

– “Co-production”

– Crowd-sourcing

– Interaction design

• Architectures

– Flat, hierarchical, hybrid

– Nested enterprises

– Interaction with holonics

Adaptive System Correctness

• Insights from field of Autonomic Computing

– Conventional systems map input space to output space

– Adaptive systems have some control over the input state

– Such feedback is highly sensitive

– Some progress e.g. in Organic Computing priority research program

• Correctness

– Point correct vs process correct

• Compositionality of adaptive mechanisms

• Verification

• Certification and regulatory frameworks

5

Phase Transition to Autonomy

• Current approaches are transactional

– Data collection

– Fault response

• Autonomous manufacturing

– Constant communication

– Predictive

• Key research challenge:

– How to manage this transition ?

– Legacy equipment

– Leverage existing capabilities

Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

• Low volume, high variability manufacturing

– Current approach: very manual

– High reconfigurability

– Compared to automated lines: expensive, slow and less consistent

• Reconfigurable manufacturing systems

– Automated

– Quick change-over time

– Short ramp-up/-down

– “Plug & Produce” benefits

– Requires fast configuration of hardware and software

6

Existing Research

• Theory-focussed

• Academic demonstrators

• Industrial collaboration

• Custom, state of the art

• How to drive uptake?

– Legacy integration

– Existing capabilities

– Industrial collaboration

SmartFactory-KL

EU FP7 PRIME Project

• Plug and Produce Multi-Agent

Environment based on

Standard Technology

• Adaptive multi-agent control

for reconfigurable

manufacturing

• Sits on top of existing

industrial control system

– Non-runtime planning

– PLCs always in control

• Potential for application of

techniques to case study

7

Addressing Research Challenges

• Optimum system morphology

– Plug & Produce

– Production planning through

simulation

• Distributed hierarchical

decision-making

– Agent-based control

– Human-in-the-loop

• Managing the phase

transition to autonomy

– Use of standard technologies

where possible

– Builds on existing control

infrastructure

– Separation of concerns

Thank You

• Any questions?

• Discussion !

• Thanks to the reviewers and our co-authors

• Supported by:

– EU FP7 “PRIME” (Grant #314762)

– UK EPSRC “Evolvable Assembly Systems” (Grant EP/K018205/1)

– UK EPSRC “The Autonomic Power System” (Grant EP/I031650/1)