Implementing self-organisation and self-management in evolvable assembly systems

Abstract

Evolvable assembly systems (EAS) are intended to tackle the challenges of agile manufacturing: high responsiveness, the ability to cope with ever-changing requirements, many variants and small lot sizes. This article discusses self-organising evolvable assembly systems (SO-EAS), which are a research direction of EAS focusing on self-organisation and self-management. SO-EAS are composed of modules with local intelligence and self-knowledge, able to self-organise to form a suitable shop-floor layout which fulfils a generic assembly plan received in input. During production, the modules self-manage while executing the assembly tasks. This article reports on the latest implementation advances, such as the integration of the agent platform Jade with the reasoning engine Jess. © 2010 IEEE.