Towards the Factory of the Future: a European Research Project for the improvement of process and quality control at factory level

Munich, 23/05/2012 (informazione.it - comunicati stampa - scienza e tecnologia) GRACE (inteGration of pRocess and quAlity Control using multi-agEnt technology) is an European research project under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission on Nanosciences, nanotechnologies, Materials and new Production technologies – NMP. The project aims at improving the future manufacturing industries, bringing together two universities, a research center and three industrial partners from four different European countries.
The majority of the traditional manufacturing control systems are not designed to exhibit the capabilities of responsiveness, flexibility, robustness and re-configurability needed to face evolving requirements of modern manufacturing, since they are built upon centralized and hierarchical control structures.
The GRACE approach is in line with the need to have modular, intelligent and distributed manufacturing control systems, having the main objective to conceive, study, develop, implement and validate a collaborative Multi-Agent System (MAS) which operates at all stages of a production line. The overall project objective is, therefore, to build a modular, flexible, adaptive, reconfigurable and responsive platform for automation at factory level which integrates process and quality control allowing the improvement of the production system performance and resulting in increased production efficiency for the case study. A fundamental mean to reach this very challenging objective is the implementation of self-adaptation and self-optimization of the manufacturing and assembly system as well of the quality control systems, so to react to planned process changes and/or to environmental unpredictable changes in the production/process.
The GRACE system will act at the Distributed Control System (DCS) and Manufacturing Execution System (MES) levels, implementing the sharing of process critical information between and inside the two layers. This results in a more efficient management of resources and a higher final product quality.
The project started on July 1st 2010 and has a duration of 36 months; actually it is in the Implementation and Validation phase. The project overcame the halfway mark of its work and the scientific and technological results developed within the different work packages will be now integrated in a real production scenario, namely a washing machine production line, in order to demonstrate the improvement of the production system performance.
Over the first 20 months of the project, the requirements of the Grace MAS architecture for line production system have been identified and its structure fully defined; the ontology to support the knowledge representation that will be used by the MAS has been also designed; the self-adaptation and self-optimization mechanisms in Washing Machine (WM) production and quality control systems have been developed, and the self optimizing and self/adapting process and quality control agents to be implemented in the project final demonstrator identified and implemented; finally, the engineering process reference model and the engineering methodology has been developed.
The effectiveness of the scientific and technological results achieved until now are proved by the following numbers:
- 12 deliverables prepared and accepted by the European Commission, 8 of which public (all the public deliverables and a summary of the confidential ones are available for downloading on the Grace website); - 7 papers accepted at highly rated international conferences in the field of controls, industrial automation, industrial informatics and intelligent manufacturing systems; other papers have been submitted to conferences taking place in the next few months; - 9 exploitable results, that is scientific and/or technological solutions which the partners will be able to exploit in their own market/research fields after the end of the project; - Several physical prototypes already realized that will be included in the project final demonstrator; 2 of those prototypes have been already installed in the WM production line.
Even though the Grace approach is demonstrated on a specific scenario, the proposed architecture can be applied to production lines in several areas of manufacturing leading to benefits in terms of maximization of production flexibility and efficiency, improvement of product quality and improvement of factory-level decision making strategies.
Grace@Automatica Hall B3 Stand 529