The Ordering Principle

One of the most important questions in the realm of topics related to production and installation of production lines is how to proceed to reduce investment for installation and how to organize the structure of such a line in order to use and reuse it for as many different or new types of products as possible. Producing on customers demand implies the ability to deliver small lot sizes for fast changing products. Evolvable production systems may in the near future turn out to be the answer for these requirements. It seems that the discussion and development of reconfigurable systems of today lead consequently to "evolvable" systems, a paradigm that is a technical challenge on many levels. This paper tries to reflect on industrial requirements that are posed on evolvable systems