Artificial Cognition in Production Systems

Today's manufacturing and assembly systems have to be flexible to adapt quickly to an increasing number and variety of products, and changing market volumes. To manage these dynamics, several production concepts (e.g., flexible, reconfigurable, changeable or autonomous manufacturing and assembly systems) were proposed and partly realized in the past years. This paper presents the general principles of autonomy and the proposed concepts, methods and technologies to realize cognitive planning, cognitive control and cognitive operation of production systems. Starting with an introduction on the historical context of different paradigms of production (e.g., evolution of production and planning systems), different approaches for the design, planning, and operation of production systems are lined out and future trends towards fully autonomous components of an production system as well as autonomous parts and products are discussed. In flexible production systems with manual and automatic assembly tasks, human-robot cooperation is an opportunity for an ergonomic and economic manufacturing system especially for low lot sizes. The state-of-the-art and a cognitive approach in this area are outlined. Furthermore, introducing self-optimizing and self-learning control systems is a crucial factor for cognitive systems. This principles are demonstrated by a quality assurance and process control in laser welding that is used to perform improved quality monitoring. Finally, as the integration of human workers into the workflow of a production system is of the highest priority for an efficient production, worker guidance systems for manual assembly with environmentally-and situationally dependent triggered paths on state-based graphs are described in this paper. Note to Practitioners-Today's manufacturing enterprises have to face a number of challenges in a turbulent environment that originates amongst other from saturated markets, unprecedented and abrupt changes in market demands, an ever increasing number of product variants and smaller lot sizes. A recent research trend in Germany is the so called Cognitive Factory, where artificial cognitive capabilities are introduced to the control of production systems. The applications range from production planning and control, human-robot-cooperation, automatic robot programming to intuitive worker guidance systems. The concept of fully automated production systems is no longer a viable vision, as it has been shown, that the conventional automation is not able to deal with the ever-rising complexity of modern production systems. Especially, a high reactivity, agility and adaptivity that is required by modern production systems, can only be reached by human operators with their immense cognitive capabilities, which enable them to react to unpredictable situations, to plan their further actions, to learn and to gain experience and to communicate with others. Thus, new concepts are required, that apply these cognitive principles to the planning processes and control systems of production systems.