ESR 9

ESR 9 – Investigation of Transition Technologies to support Assembly Station Reconfiguration in the automotive industry

Project Description

The project will finalise a door assembly station for the automotive industry. The aim of the project is to enable full re-configurability of the robot and its peripheral equipment for future variants and new products. The project will develop commercial PLC approaches into the INTROSYS development called DNA, which is an extension of the evolvable paradigm. This project intends to demonstrate the transition between the current centralised PLC control paradigm to the purely multi-agent, distributed control approach used in evolvable systems.

Starting from a fully featured job description the first step is to extract and describe all the featured processes in a structured manner. In particular all the necessary low level tasks must be identified and, consequently, allocated to both a particular subset of product variants that requires it and on the particular piece of equipment devoted to perform it. The result of this analytical step is a so called “taxonomy of the processes”.

Host Institution

Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan (KTH), Sweden

Planned Secondments

INTROSYS, MTC

Lead Supervisors

KTH - Prof Mauro Onori & Prof Antonio Maffei