Self-organising assembly systems formally specified in Maude

Abstract

This article recapitulates on the research done in self-organising assembly systems (SOAS) and presents the completed formal specifications and their simulation in Maude. SOAS are assembly systems that (1) participate in their own design by spontaneously organising themselves in the shop floor layout in response to the arrival of a product order and (2) manage themselves during production. The self-organising process for SOAS to design themselves follows the Chemical Abstract Machine (CHAM) paradigm: industrial robots self-select and self-arrange according to specific chemical rules in response to a product order with generic assembly instructions (GAP). This article presents an additional set of rules describing how the GAP is transformed into layout-specific assembly instructions, which is a kind of recipe for how the self-organising robots assemble the product.