Abstract
Facing fierce competition in mass customization, rapid response to dynamic changes is strategically important for manufactures to increase opportunity of survival in high-mix, low-volume (HMLV) environment. The traditional dedicated manufacturing system for mass production is required to become modular, scalable and reconfigurable for increasing flexibility and responsiveness to cope with the changing market. Motivated by a hybrid assembly cell lines (HACL) in real-life, a distributed assembly cells system, inspired by swarm intelligence (SI) concept and swarm robotics, has been proposed, named swarm assembly system (SAS). In order to apply and reap the benefits of SI to SAS, three main components are designed by referring to swarm robot system and they are human-cyber-physical system holon (HCPS Holon), intelligent assembly workstation (iWorkstation) and operational framework of SAS. Computer vision technologies are employed to monitor and analyze real-time worker status and operation information within the iWorkstation for closed-loop adaptive control. The hybrid operational framework of SAS provides the basis for communication between iWrokstations and global decision making. Several scenarios are designed to show its potential benefits in robustness, reconfigurability and scalability, resulting in enhancing responsiveness in HMLV environment.
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