From flexibility to true Evolvability: An introduction to the basic requirements

In the field of production engineering, most of the past paradigms introduced automation and computer science at shopfloor level based on the concept of system flexibility. Nevertheless their limits in approaching some fundamental areas such as the modularisation or the control issues, make them unsuitable to tackle the current dynamic scenarios & challenges. In this paper a review of past approaches, underlining their weaknesses, leads to propose a methodology for the creation of a manufacturing system, based on the Evolvable Paradigm. The salient points of this scheme are the process oriented approach to modularisation and the link between the development of the system and the design of the product. The potential economical benefits can render automation a sustainable solution even for SMEs. One fundamental requirement to pursue Full Autonomy and Evolvability is to deeply study the processes in order to represent them at hardware level, enabling the exploitment of the Emergent Behavior by the Control System, that for this reason has to be distributed.