An agent based architecture to support monitoring in plug and produce manufacturing systems using knowledge extraction

In recent years a set of production paradigms were proposed in order to capacitate manufacturers to meet the new market requirements, such as the shift in demand for highly customized products resulting in a shorter product life cycle, rather than the traditional mass production standardized consumables. These new paradigms advocate solutions capable of facing these requirements, empowering manufacturing systems with a high capacity to adapt along with elevated flexibility and robustness in order to deal with disturbances, like unexpected orders or malfunctions. Evolvable Production Systems propose a solution based on the usage of modularity and self-organization with a fine granularity level, supporting pluggability and in this way allowing companies to add and/or remove components during execution without any extra re-programming effort. However, current monitoring software was not designed to fully support these characteristics, being commonly based on centralized SCADA systems, incapable of re-adapting during execution to the unexpected plugging/unplugging of devices nor changes in the entire system’s topology. Considering these aspects, the work developed for this thesis encompasses a fully distributed agent-based architecture, capable of performing knowledge extraction at different levels of abstraction without sacrificing the capacity to add and/or remove monitoring entities, responsible for data extraction and analysis, during runtime

A multi-agent architecture for plug and produce on an industrial assembly platform

YesModern manufacturing companies face increased pressures to adapt to shorter product life cycles and the need to reconfigure more frequently their production systems to offer new product variants. This paper proposes a new multi-agent architecture utilising “plug and produce” principles for configuration and reconfiguration of production systems with minimum human intervention. A new decision-making approach for system reconfiguration based on tasks re-allocation is presented using goal driven methods. The application of the proposed architecture is described with a number of architectural views and its deployment is illustrated using a validation scenario implemented on an industrial assembly platform. The proposed methodology provides an innovative application of a multi-agent control environment and architecture with the objective of significantly reducing the time for deployment and ramp-up of small footprint assembly systems.The reported research has been part of the EU FP7 research project “PRIME

Agent-based reconfiguration in a micro-flow production cell

The world is moving towards to the fourth industrial revolution, usually linked with the Industrie 4.0 initiative, enables the digitization of manufacturing factories by using Cyber-Physical Systems and emergent technologies like Internet of Things and Internet of Services. The seamless reconfiguration of these complex industrial cyber-physical systems is an important challenge for the complete implementation of this revolution, being necessary to re-think the way such mechanisms can be designed and engineered. This paper presents an agentbased reconfiguration system for the dynamic and seamless reconfiguration of a physically-reconfigurable modular micro-flow production system in the area of manufacturing of aerospace engine components.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Specification of the PERFoRM architecture for the seamless production system reconfiguration

The world is assisting to the fourth industrial revolution, with several domains of science and technology being strongly developed and, specially, being integrated with each other, allowing to build evolvable complex systems. Data digitization, big-data analysis, distributed control, Industrial Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems and self-organization, amongst others, are playing an important role in this journey. This paper considers the best practices from previous successful European projects addressing distributed control systems to develop an innovative architecture that can be industrially deployed. For this purpose, a particular design process has to be addressed in order to consider the requirements and functionalities from various use cases. To investigate the known practices, four use cases are enlighted in this paper, which cover a wide spectrum of the European industrial force, as well as industrial standards to support a smooth migration from traditional systems to the emergent distributed systems.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Engineering of next generation cyber-physical automation system architectures

Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) enable flexible and reconfigurable realization of automation system architectures, utilizing distributed control architectures with non-hierarchical modules linked together through different communication systems. Several control system architectures have been developed and validated in the past years by research groups. However, there is still a lack of implementation in industry. The intention of this work is to provide a summary of current alternative control system architectures that could be applied in industrial automation domain as well as a review of their commonalities. The aim is to point out the differences between the traditional centralized and hierarchical architectures to discussed ones, which rely on decentralized decision-making and control. Challenges and impacts that industries and engineers face in the process of adopting decentralized control architectures are discussed, analysing the obstacles for industrial acceptance and the new necessary interdisciplinary engineering skills. Finally, an outlook of possible mitigation and migration actions required to implement the decentralized control architectures is addressed.The authors would like to thank the European Commission for the support, and the partners of the EU Horizon 2020 project PERFoRM (2016b) for the fruitful discussions. The PERFoRM project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 680435.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Phenolic profiling, biological activities and in silico studies of Acacia tortilis (Forssk.) Hayne ssp. raddiana extracts

The authors are grateful to the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, Portugal) for financial support through national funds FCT/MCTES to CIMO (UIDB/00690/2020). L. Barros and R. C. Calhelha thank the national funding by the FCT, P.I., through the institutional scientific employment program-contract for their contracts. M. Carocho also thanks the project ValorNatural for his research contract. The authors are also grateful to the FEDER-Interreg España- Portugal programme for financial support through the project 0377_Iberphenol_6_E.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Instantiating the PERFORM system architecture for industrial case studies

The PERFoRM project, an innovation action promoted within the scope of the EU Horizon 2020 program, advocates the use of an Industrie 4.0 compliant system architecture for the seamless reconfiguration of robots and machinery. The system architecture re-uses the innovative results from previous successful R & D projects on distributed control systems domain, such as SOCRADES, IMC-AESOP, GRACE and IDEAS. This paper, after describing the main pillars of the PERFoRM system architecture, focuses on mapping the system architecture into four industrial use cases aiming to validate the system architecture design before its deployment in the real environments.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Panel on future challenges in modeling methodology

This panel paper presents the views of six researchers and practitioners of simulation modeling. Collectively we attempt to address a range of key future challenges to modeling methodology. It is hoped that the views of this paper, and the presentations made by the panelists at the 2004 Winter Simulation Conference will raise awareness and stimulate further discussion on the future of modeling methodology in areas such as modeling problems in business applications, human factors and geographically dispersed networks; rapid model development and maintenance; legacy modeling approaches; markup languages; virtual interactive process design and simulation; standards; and Grid computing

Increase the adoption of Agent-based Cyber-Physical Production Systems through the Design of Minimally Invasive Solutions

During the last few years, many approaches were proposed to offer companies the ability to have dynamic and flexible production systems. One of the conventional ap-proaches to solving this problem is the implementation of cyber-physical production sys-tems using multi-agent distributed systems. Although these systems can deal with several challenges faced by companies in this area, they have not been accepted and used in real cases. In this way, the primary objective of the proposed work is to understand the chal-lenges usually found in the adoption of these solutions and to develop a strategy to in-crease their acceptance and implementation. Thus, the document focuses on the design and development of cyber-physical produc-tion systems based on agent approaches, requiring minimal changes in the existing pro-duction systems. This approach aims of reducing the impact and the alterations needed to adopt those new cyber-physical production systems. Clarifying the subject, the author presents a definition of a minimal invasive agent-based cyber-physical production system and, the functional requirements that the designers and developers must respect to imple-ment the new software. From these functional requirements derived a list of design princi-ples that must be fulfilled to design and develop a system with these characteristics. Subsequently, to evaluate solutions that aim to be minimally invasive, an evaluation model based on a fuzzy inference system is proposed, which rank the approaches accord-ing to each of the design principles and globally. In this way, the proposed work presents the functional requirements, design principles and evaluation model of minimally invasive cyber-physical production systems, to increase the adoption of such systems