Evolvable production systems, context and implications

Agility, reactivity and sustainability are key to cope with today's dynamic markets, as has been broadly recognized. Depending on the source, manufacturing systems are required to be modular, hierarchical or heterarchical, distributed, flexible or reconfigurable; companies can be represented using the bionic, fractal and holonic concepts. Evolvable production systems fulfill the majority of the requirements elaborated by the agile and reconfigurable approaches and take nature as a metaphor. Modularity of fine granularity and local intelligence allow truly process-specific system design. EPS provide mechanisms for fast reconfiguration at mechanical as well as control level. They apply the multi-agent paradigm, which is intrinsically suited for distributed systems. Inspired by biology, artificial intelligence and complexity theory, EPS open the doors for the production systems of the future: the aim is to implement advanced concepts such as self- organization, self-diagnose and self-healing. Coping with emergent behavior will be fundamental, and taking profit of emergent capabilities will open considerable potential for new solutions