Realizing Autonomous Characteristics of Modern Manufacturing Systems for Adapting to Disturbances

The mega trends of manufacturing are sustainability, urbanization, globalization, ageing, technologies, and individualism. In which the individualism trend asks for more customized products, shorter product life cycles, best quality and lower prices that grow the complexity and dynamics in manufacturing environment. There are the challenges of the modern manufacturing systems. Autonomy allows the manufacturing systems to overcome these challenges. With the autonomous characteristics, the modern manufacturing systems shows the self-X capabilities such as self-configuration, self-control capability, self-optimization, self-adaptation, and self-maintenance as well as cooperation of elements in the system for carrying out the tasks in autonomous way. In this paper, the model of an autonomous manufacturing system (AMS) with autonomous characteristics are presented. For realizing the system, key technologies such as information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure (IoT, cognitive agent, sensor network), bio-inspired technologies (artificial intelligence) are applied. To prove the functionality of the proposed system, case studies including self-adaptation, and re-scheduling in the case of disturbance are carried out. For implementing the AMS based on agents, KEPServerEX is used for collecting data; C# is used for programming agent system. Two cases (self-adaptation, re-scheduling) are tested successfully.