Slide presentation from the Winner of the Best Paper Award at the FocAS Workshop on Fundamentals of Collective Adaptive Systems Workshop at SASO 2015.

1. 1
Advanced Manufacturing:
An Industrial Application for
Collective Adaptive Systems
David Sanderson, Nikolas Antzoulatos, Jack Chaplin, Dídac
Busquets, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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)