A new redundancy strategy for enabling graceful degradation in resilient robotic flexible assembly cells

Abstract

The development of resilience in manufacturing systems has drawn more attention than ever. Using redundant components is one of the key strategies for building and enhancing the resilience of a manufacturing system. However, current redundancy strategies require duplicated machinery employed either in active or in standby status. This in turn causes extra costs in designing and achieving resilience. Achieving an efficient deployment of the redundant component in the face of failures is also challenging. In this paper, we introduce a novel redundancy strategy, called adaptive standby redundancy (ASR), to achieve resilient performance for discrete manufacturing systems while reducing the cost of employing the duplicated components that are typically used in traditional systems. This novel strategy permits achievement of high levels of utilisation of the system and graceful degradation in case of failure, keeping the system functional. The strategy is then validated in a developed robotic flexible assembly cell (RFAC), which is tested and results on its efficacy and performance enhancement are discussed.