Design of evolvable manufacturing processes

Modern manufacturing systems are subject to uncertainties, shrinking time to market and fast advance of technology innovation. Evolution capability endows a design with the ability to tailor itself to fit the constantly changing demands to improve customer satisfaction and to reduce the risks. Cross-fertilization of multi-agent system theory with evolutionary computation theory is one possible way to robustly and proactively achieve the production objectives and continuously optimize the performance in constantly changing environment. This paper focuses on development of evolutionary agents based on fusion of multi-agent framework and evolutionary computational theory to design evolvable manufacturing systems. The problem is to form the production process and allocate resources to meet the product demands cost effectively. Our results include: (1) a multi-agent model based on contract net collaboration process and Petri net theory and (2) an evolutionary computational algorithm to continuously improve the system performance based on the available resources and product demands. The preliminary results provide a theoretical framework to support the implementation of evolvable multi-agent manufacturing systems