Enabling the Digital Thread for Product Aware Human and Robot Collaboration - An Agent-oriented System Architecture

Customized product requirements are driving the need for variety oriented assemblies even in collaborative environments between humans and robots. This calls for the need for robots and humans to be intelligent in order to be aware of and adapt to different product needs. To address this, this study presents a novel approach and architecture to realize a digital thread that allows human and robot agents access to the product model at system run-time. The approach entails modelling a knowledge-based engineering (KBE) software as an agent which actively participates with collaborative agents via communication mechanisms standardized by the IEEE Computer Society. The architecture is described by four concurrent views and is discussed for its advantages and design rationale.