Optimization of the Reconfiguration Planning of Cyber-Physical Production Systems with Delta-Like Architecture

Data availability and modular design of modern production systems allow companies to respond flexibly to changing market conditions and process requirements. Against this background, this contribution presents tools to automatically identify energy efficient (re)configuration patterns. Therefore, market studies are used to reveal industrially relevant demand-related handling tasks and potential configurations for the well-known Delta parallel robot, as well as recent design modifications extending its field of application. In this context, optimization approaches are innovatively employed to effectively reduce the configuration space by discarding infeasible candidates and eventually solve the problem of simultaneous selection and allocation of configurations, such that a set of given handling tasks is performed in the most energy efficient way. Additionally, kinematic constraints are included in order to maintain the throughput rates of the underlying system. The approach is easily transferable to a system layout with reconfigurable, but also predetermined subsystems.