Adaptive Manufacturing: Challenges to the Industrial and Scientific Community

Adaptive manufacturing posesmany challenges to the industrial and scientific community. One of the main interesting issues, still requiring further research efforts, consist in achieving effective modularisation of both control systems and related physical machinery. Modularisation brings evident advantages towards effective and fast reconfiguration of assembly lines, maintaining at the same time high reliability of the single machinery as well as safety and effectiveness of more complex production units. Safety and reliability of either a single device or production cell are however not enough in order to ensure safety of more complex assembly units. Novel methodologies which consider manufacturing at the system level are then required. In general, safety (as well as hazard) is indeed an emergent systemic property and as such requires to be dealt with specific, system oriented, methodologies. Such methodologies allow to obtain control software which is “correct-by-design” and are tightly integrated with design: interestingly, such methodologies may be applied from the intra-device level to single devices, machinery, production units, assembly lines. As complexity increases, it becomes possible to deal with single primary faults within simple mechanical components (for example small engines and actuators) to more complex units, for example production cells and assembly lines, providing increasing levels of failure detection and protection, ranging from primary faults to fail operational and fail safe behaviours.