Flexible Manufacturing

The Evolvable Assembly systems project will adopt the methods of context-awareness, multi-agent swarm intelligence and self-adaptation. Context-awareness will provide each individual element with the understating of the surrounding environment; multi-agent swarm intelligence will support system self-organisation based on a community of autonomous and cooperative entities; and self-adaptation will allow the development of a goal driven collective behaviour leading to purposeful system evolution. The proposed programme is a radical departure from the current philosophy of reconfigurable manufacturing - it will create a framework for autonomous context-aware and adaptable assembly and manufacturing systems that can co-evolve with products, processes and business and social environment. This transformational approach presents theoretical, technical and social challenges that demand new fundamental multidisciplinary research.

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Application of the Data Distribution Service for Flexible Manufacturing Automation

This paper discusses the applicability of the Data Distribution Service (DDS) for the development of automated and modular manufacturing systems which require a flexible and robust communication infrastructure. DDS is an emergent standard for datacentric publish/subscribe middleware systems that provides an infrastructure for platform-independent many-to-many communication.

Publication Year: 
2008
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