A Symbolic Approach to Self-optimisation in Production System Analysis and Control

Abstract

With steadily increasing customer requirements on quality of both products and processes, companies are faced with increasing organisational and technical challenges. The market is characterised by individualised customer wishes which result in individual adaptations of the products. In order to manage this rapidly growing variety of products, the production system has to become much more flexible with respect to the product structure to be manufactured and the corresponding production and assembly processes. Especially in the field of assembly systems the increasing variety of products adds new complexities to the planning process and increases the costs, because (re-)planning efforts tend to grow exponentially to the number of variants.