From Automation to Autonomy - a New Trend for Smart Manufacturing

Today’s dilemma of the manufacturing system is to realize stable processes while manufacturing’s environment is affected by global competition, high degree of complexity and autonomy, short delivery times and high product variety. In order to guarantee the requested product quality and reduce downtime, the smart manufacturing (SM) which is considered as a new trend helps to meet objectives associated with these problems and improve the productivity, quality, cost and competiveness. From an engineering perspective, the SM is the reinforced application of advanced intelligence and cognitive technologies to enable rapid productivity, dynamic response to product quality demand and real-time self-optimization of production process. It creates an autonomy environment across a series of workpiece and manufacturing system. Nowadays, due to the evolution of the information and communications technologies, the SM technique has promised to explore selfoptimizing manufacturing in industry by its potential such as maintaining process stability. For this purpose, in this article the benefits and challenges of self-optimizing manufacturing concept regarding its capability and responsibility are presented describing the adaptation to changing manufacturing environment.