Emerging Behavior as driver for the sustainability of a modular, “skills-centric” production system

The current main challenge for the future production system lies in the correct integration of the issues related to sustainability and to agility. The “Evolvable Paradigm” addresses this concern with a new way of engineering the whole production system. The concept of Skill is declined as common denominator between the definitions of manufacturing process and manufacturing equipment. Each production module holds some of the skills that compose the process definition and it is endowed with the necessary intelligence to come together with the other modules in an organized society. This work introduces the approach adopted in the IDEAS project (Instantly Deployable Evolvable Assembly System) to cope with the above mentioned requirement through the presented paradigm. While fully featured and described IDEAS mechatronic architecture allows rapid reconfiguration of the system, the issue of sustainability is targeted by the open definition of the concepts of skill and skills interaction. The result of skill aggregation is hereby called Emergent Behavior and in the proposed model it can be seen as the main driver for the sustainable use of the system.