Designing Self-Organization for Evolvable Assembly Systems

Current solutions for industrial manufacturing assembly systems do not suit the needs of mass customization industry, which is facing low production volumes, many variants and rapidly changing conditions. This paper proposes the concept of self-organizing evolvable assembly systems, where assembly system modules and product parts to be assembled self-organize and self-adapt (among others, choose their coalition partners, their location and monitor themselves) in order to easily and quickly produce a new or reconfigured assembly system each time a new product order arrives or each time a failure or weakness arises in the current assembly system. This paper presents the design and partial implementation of such a system following an architecture for self-organizing and self-adaptive systems based on policies enforced at run-time on the basis of collected and updated metadata. As a case study, the assembly of a adhesive tape roller dispenser is considered.