Emergent diagnosis for Evolvable Production Systems

A wide range of paradigms have been proposed that, taking advantage of the emerging IT technologies, increasingly support autonomous and evolvable shop-floors which are able to react to disturbances and opportunities. Among the emerging paradigmatic proposals the concept of Evolvable Production System (EPS) is emerging as it proposes a holistic approach with clear prospects for enhancing business and environmental competitiveness. EPS systems are knowledge driven and are dynamic compositions of intelligent and interacting modules. While most of the research in such distributed industrial systems is focused in the study and establishment of control structures, the problem of diagnosis has been left relatively unattended. There are however significant open challenges in the diagnosis of such modular systems including: understanding fault propagation and ensuring scalability and co-evolution. A diagnostic architecture is proposed that addresses these issues.