Download Project Specification LDR - IEI: Linköping University

Project Specification
Benchmarking of Autonomous and Highly Reconfigurable Production
Systems
Supervisor:
Luis Ribeiro (Linköping University) - [email protected]
Background:
The pervasiveness of distributed computing controllers, with high computational capabilities, in
current shop floors has led to the emergence of several models/architectures for fully autonomous
operation of plants. These models build on state of the art research combining artificial intelligence
with distributed computing and production. Autonomy in this context implies that stations, buffers,
storage, transport elements and the products themselves are abstracted as individual “intelligent”
entities that can take runtime decisions to improve production particularly under:
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Faults or failures: by actively seeking for alternative stations and re-routing products therein.
Productions fluctuations: by constantly analysing the flow of parts in the production floor and
optimizing the utilization of the available resources.
These systems are therefore substantially different from traditional automated systems in that they
foster the autonomy of their components, by a mix of distributed control and artificial intelligence,
and promote a plug and produce environment. All these factors account for rich, yet complex,
interaction dynamics that should be characterized.
Objectives:
The project has as main objective the study, in simulation, of how the autonomous actions taken by
the system’s components and the plug and produce actions affect their overall performance. The
project will use a customized simulation environment and the latest state of the art architectures
developed under recent international research projects in the area.
Proposed steps:
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Get acquainted with the latest research in the field of autonomous and highly reconfigurable
production systems.
Brief introduction to the simulation environment.
Identification of the main metrics to be used in the benchmarking of the system under study.
Design of a simulation test case.
Analysis of the results.
Deliverables:
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Report documenting the project and subsequent results.
Requirements:
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Very basic notions of programming.