Adaptable Capability-Based Planning

Future manufacturing systems are required to be adaptable and to quickly react on changes in markets and demands. There is a shift towards mass customization. Therefore, future manufacturing systems must be able to support individualized products that are tailored to customer needs. The switch between different products should involve little manual intervention. In this paper, the issues that need to be resolved to achieve adaptability in production planning are highlighted and ideas for solutions are presented. A detailed approach for the question of automatically generating action sequences is presented here. It is based on a capability model of the resources and their material flow. We also suggest decoupling product descriptions from factories and planning adaptably based on pre-defined product descriptions and factory setups. Action sequences can then be generated out of these models and later translated into executable action sequences. The action sequence can be automatically downloaded and executed on a resource. The presented approach is evaluated on an educational production system with industrial components. Issues and future research directions are illustrated as well.