Adaptation of Manufacturing Systems in Dynamic Environment Based on Capability Description Method
Year: 2012
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: IntroductionNowadays manufacturing systems are characterized by constantly changing requirements caused by short lifecycle times of products, small batch sizes, increasing number of product variants and fast emergence of new technical solutions.Today's turbulent production environment calls for adaptive and rapidly responding production systems that can adjust to required changes both in production capacity and processing functions.The European level strategic goal towards Competitive Sustainable Manufacturing (CSM) asks for the re-use and adaptation of production systems (Jovane et al., 2009).Adaptation allows users to utilize the full lifetime and potential of the systems and equipment and in this way supports the sustainability, both from economic and ecologic perspectives.However, in the previous projects (e.g.(Harms et al., 2008)), it has been recognized that, because of often expensive and inefficient adaptation process, companies rarely decide to adapt their production systems.This is mainly due lacking or insufficient information and documentation about the capabilities of the current system and its lifecycle, as well as lack of extensive methods to plan the adaptation.Today the adaptation of production systems is practically a human driven process, which relies strongly on the expertise of the system integrators or the end user of the system.Different manufacturing paradigms have been initiated in recent years to overcome the challenges relating to adaptivity requirements.Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) aim to meet these requirements by offering rapid adjustment of production capacity and functionality, in response to new circumstances, by rearrangement or change in their structure as well as in hardware and software components (ElMaraghy, 2006;ElMaraghy, 2009;Koren et al., 1999;Mehrabi et al., 2000).Agent-based and holonic systems take more dynamic approach to cope with the changeability requirements.Distributed Manufacturing System (DiMS) concept developed by Nylund et al. (2008) and Salminen et al. ( 2009) is based on holonic architecture, where the holons are autonomous entities able to communicate with other holons and form set of holons, holarchies, through common, well-defined, interfaces and negotiation process.In DiMS the production environment is seen as dynamic and evolving open complex system, where the decision making is based on negotiation process between these entities.Holonic manufacturing systems aim to offer a solution for changeability requirements by providing self-organizing capabilities.Whereas the reconfigurable system research focuses mainly on physical adaptation, in the latter approach www.intechopen.comManufacturing System 94 the adaptation is performed also on logical and parametric levels.However, no matter if the adaptation is happening on physical, logical or parametric level, intelligent methods and tools are needed to support efficient planning of adaptation.A critical factor for computer-aided production system design and adaptation planning is efficient resource models, which provide the needed information for equipment selection and system integration.This chapter will introduce a novel method to formally describe the capabilities of resources to support the manufacturing system adaptation.First, in section 2, the term adaptation is defined.Section 3 reviews some existing approaches for describing resource capabilities.Section 4 will then describe the developed capability description method and in section 5 the mapping between product requirements and system capabilities will be covered.In section 6 case application of the capability descriptions in a holonic manufacturing framework, build into TUT heavy machining laboratory, will be discussed.Also the modular software system architecture of the holonic system will be introduced.Finally, the future work is discussed in section 7, followed by the conclusions in section 8. Adaptation of manufacturing systemsThis section aims to clarify the concept of adaptation in the context of this research.First, the traditional classification of different adaptation types is introduced.After that the Systems approach to adaptation is discussed.Finally, the relation between capabilities and adaptation is highlighted. Classification of adaptation typesWiendahl and Heger (2004) identified five types of changeability of manufacturing systems: reconfigurability, changeoverability, flexibility, transformability and agility.Later on Wiendahl et al. (2007) used changeability as a general term as a characteristic of a system to accomplish early and foresighted adjustment of the factory's structures and processes on all levels to change impulses economically.Based on the literature around flexible, reconfigurable and adaptive manufacturing (ElMaraghy, 2009;ElMaraghy, 2006;Koren, 2006;Mehrabi et al,. 2000;Tolio & Valente, 2006), it is difficult to completely differentiate these concepts.Flexibility is often referred to the ability to adapt to different requirements without physical changes to the system, whereas reconfigurability refers to the ability to change system components when new requirements arise (ElMaraghy, 2006).However, these definitions can be used only if the boundary of the system is clearly defined.Tolio and Valente (2006) stated that depending on the border, the type of changeability can be interpreted as reconfigurability or as flexibility and therefore, it is not possible to define general statements for these characteristics.ElMaraghy (2006) divided the manufacturing system reconfiguration into both physical and logical reconfiguration touching those both definitions of flexibility and reconfigurability.In order to avoid misunderstandings caused by the old definitions of reconfigurability, flexibility and other related terms, the term 'adaptivity' is used in this work, including both physical adaptation (reconfiguration) and logical adaptation.Besides those two types, also parametric adaptation is included into the definition.Fig. 1 represents and explains these three types of production system adaptation.www.intechopen.
Source: InTech eBooks
Parent work: Manufacturing System
DOI: 10.5772/35386
Institution: Tampere University of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W1574634316