Why Symbolic AI is a Key Technology for Self-Adaption in the Context of CPPS

Abstract

The vision of smart factories are self-diagnosing, self-optimizing and self-adapting Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS). Self-adaption, on which this paper focuses on, means that the CPPS can adapt itself to a changing environment, so that the downtime costs can be reduced by using the system modules most efficient. An architecture is introduced and demonstrated on a concrete use case to show how this capability can be achieved by using different Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. For each technique, we define challenges that have to be solved to use it in a real world environment. Additionally, we illustrate the symbolic and subsymbolic AI and argue why symbolic AI is an important aspect in the context of CPPS.