Pedro Neves

Evolvable production systems

Sustainability, given as a goal for future industry, is not only an issue for production engineering. Economy and ecology are an actual concern of governments and individuals worldwide. An effort must be carried on in order to reduce energy and resource consumption, deal with the possibility of climate changes and, at the same time, keep competitive in a world ruled by economic demands. In accordance with these demands, the evolvable production systems (EPS) has aimed at developing such technological solutions and support mechanisms. The essence of evolvable production systems resides in building a system with several independent process-oriented modules that possess the ability to dynamically adapt to the changing conditions of operation. Evolvability aims to attain highly adaptable control and mechanical systems enhancing re-usability and interoperability of modules, extending their life cycle and enabling short deployment times at shop floor level. Customisation and the shorter life time of products demand a continuous adaptation of the manufacturing systems and consequently enterprises must change systems development from reaction to short-term events to long term strategic development. Enterprises can follow this strategy by re-thinking their organisational levels and structure, aligning systems development re-engineering process (adopting EPS approach) with Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) in order to enhance manufacturing agility from management to shop floor level. This paper will present evolvable production systems advantages in order to achieve such results towards more ecological and economically suitable production systems.

Visualization tool to support multi-agent mechatronic based systems

There has been an increasing interest from industry in distributed architectures since they promote a plug-and-produce and robust environment, where adaptability and fault tolerance are native. Much research has been conducted in this field mainly supported by multi-agent and service oriented technologies. Nevertheless the retrieval and visualization of information in distributed systems is a relatively unexplored area. Although the dynamic nature of the multi-agent systems allows gathering information in a prompt manner, doing so might affect the performance of the mechatronic agents. In this sense, the present paper details the architecture of a visualization tool that introduces a reliable but non-invasive approach to retrieve data from distributed platforms as well as a new way to visualize and interpret the information gathered from mechatronic based systems.

Dealing with the unpredictable: An Evolvable Robotic Assembly Cell

The work presented in this paper intends to clarify how the Evolvable Assembly Systems (EAS) paradigm has been used to develop a robotic assembly cell based on a fully reconfigurable robot. The work includes some detail of the multiagent architecture based on coalitions of assembly modules and how this was successfully used to implement the control architecture for EAS.

The Effect of Flaxseed in Breast Cancer: A Literature Review

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers and the second most responsible for cancer mortality worldwide. In 2014, in Portugal approximately 27,200 people died of cancer, of which 1,791 were women with breast cancer. Flaxseed has been one of the most studied foods, regarding possible relations to breast cancer, though mainly in experimental studies in animals, yet in few clinical trials. It is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, α-linolenic acid, lignan, and fibers. One of the main components of flaxseed is the lignans, of which 95% are made of the predominant secoisolariciresinol diglucoside (SDG). SDG is converted into enterolactone and enterodiol, both with antiestrogen activity and structurally similar to estrogen; they can bind to cell receptors, decreasing cell growth. Some studies have shown that the intake of omega-3 fatty acids is related to the reduction of breast cancer risk. In animal studies, α-linolenic acids have been shown to be able to suppress growth, size, and proliferation of cancer cells and also to promote breast cancer cell death. Other animal studies found that the intake of flaxseed combined with tamoxifen can reduce tumor size to a greater extent than taking tamoxifen alone. Additionally, some clinical trials showed that flaxseed can have an important role in decreasing breast cancer risk, mainly in postmenopausal women. Further studies are needed, specifically clinical trials that may demonstrate the potential benefits of flaxseed in breast cancer.

Characterization of an agile bio-inspired shop-floor

Sustainability is currently one of the biggest challenges and drivers of manufacturing industry. With traditional automation approaches becoming evermore inadequate to support sustainable mass customized production, the research focus is moving towards agile systems that enact companies with the ability to quickly reconfigure their shop-floors by seamlessly deploying or removing modules. Such systems are envisioned as key for attaining a profitable and sustainable industrial development. In this sense, this paper attempts to characterize an innovative approach that relies on bio-inspired concepts as the main control mechanism, in order to foster sustainability by attaining the necessary shop-floor agility. Furthermore an experimental setup is presented and the results are analysed, in order to understand the influence and impact of the main properties of the approach towards the system performance.

Evolvable Production Systems: Approach towards Modern Production Systems

To face current socio-economic adverse conditions enterprises must increase their efficiency and evolve to the requirements of customization and sustainability. Modern production systems need to deal with instability of markets and resource scarcity regarding an economical, ecological and social concern. The Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) has aimed at developing such technological solutions and support mechanisms that may endow European assembly companies to fulfil these demands. EPS seeks highly adaptable control and mechanical systems enhancing re-usability and interoperability of modules, extending their life cycle and enabling short deployment times at shop floor level. Only with very agile and adaptable systems will be possible to enhance material re-usability, reduce energy consumption and give a quick response to unforeseen changed conditions or new business opportunities. This paper will present Evolvable Production Systems advantages in order to achieve such results towards more ecological and economically suitable production systems.

Performance Assessment in Self-organising Mechatronic Systems: A First Step towards Understanding the Topology Influence in Complex Behaviours

The research and development of self-organising mechatronic systems has been a hot topic in the past 10 years which conducted to very promising results in the close past. The proof of concept attained in IDEAS project [1] that plug&produce can be achieved in these systems opens up new research horizons on the topics of system design, configuration and performance evaluation. These topics need to consider that the systems are no longer static prototypes but instead several distributed components that can be added and removed in runtime. The distribution of modules in the system and their inherent connections will then potentially affect the system’s global behaviour. Hence it is vital to understand the impact on performance as the system endures changes that affect its topology. This article presents an exploratory test case that shows that as a system evolves (and the nature of the network of its components changes) the performance of the system is necessarily affected in a specific direction. This performance landscape is necessarily complex and very likely nonlinear. Simulation plays therefore an important role in the study of these systems as a mean to generate data that can be later on used to generate macro level knowledge that may act as a guideline to improve both design and configuration.

Continuous precise workload control method

The diversity of requirements and the frequency of change in the market can only be competed with dynamicity and responsiveness in both production and planning systems. In this sense, working principles of a novel workload control method, called continuous precise workload control are presented in this paper. The implementation of the method is based on a multi-agent based architecture. The presented approach generates dynamic non periodic release decisions exploiting real time shop floor information. The performance of the system and correlation of norm value against the assessment range are investigated through an experimented test case.

Emerging Behavior as driver for the sustainability of a modular, “skills-centric” production system

The current main challenge for the future production system lies in the correct integration of the issues related to sustainability and to agility. The “Evolvable Paradigm” addresses this concern with a new way of engineering the whole production system. The concept of Skill is declined as common denominator between the definitions of manufacturing process and manufacturing equipment. Each production module holds some of the skills that compose the process definition and it is endowed with the necessary intelligence to come together with the other modules in an organized society. This work introduces the approach adopted in the IDEAS project (Instantly Deployable Evolvable Assembly System) to cope with the above mentioned requirement through the presented paradigm. While fully featured and described IDEAS mechatronic architecture allows rapid reconfiguration of the system, the issue of sustainability is targeted by the open definition of the concepts of skill and skills interaction. The result of skill aggregation is hereby called Emergent Behavior and in the proposed model it can be seen as the main driver for the sustainable use of the system

Evolutionary Theories in Manufacturing : Inspiration from Biology, Society, and Evolutionary Computing

Darwins evolutionary theory of natural selection has had a strong impact on both science and culture, and has over the last decades become a popular inspiration in engineering sciences. Both the wide range of scientific areas where evolutionary theory is applied, and the simplistic metaphors used to explain evolution in schools and non-scientific situations have caused confusion of how key evolutionary concepts should be understood. In this paper, the cornerstones in biological and social evolutionary theory are identified and addressed from an engineering point of view. Previous efforts to apply evolutionary theories within engineering are then addressed and related to the needs and opportunities within manufacturing and assembly.