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.