An Automated Approach for Adaptive Control Systems

The paper deals with adaptive manufacturing systems to be composed of various machines for optimal productions of jobs. The authors assume three types of constraints to be respected: 1 deals with the system's performance which is related to productivity rates and should be kept acceptable as much as possible, 2 deals with the energy consumption which should be kept stable or minimal, and 3 deals with emissions of CO2 which should be kept minimal for future systems. They define a reconfiguration scenario as any operation allowing addition and/or removals of jobs and/or machines to/from production lines for safety when faults occur. To meet all fixed constraints, the authors propose an agent-based architecture where an intelligent software agent is defined to evaluate the whole system's architecture after any reconfiguration scenario, and to define useful technical solutions when constraints are violated. It suggests run-time modifications of productivity rates and/or realization times of jobs and/or also removals of some jobs according to well-defined constraints. The users supervising the production lines can dynamically accept or reject these solutions according to production business strategies and also some other constraints. The authors apply the paper's contribution to a formal drilling manufacturing platform, and to the footwear factory of ITIA-CNR.