Natural Computing: an international journal
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This paper addresses a vision of future manufacturing systems, which are highly agile, user friendly, and increasingly based on autonomous components. Evolvable assembly systems (EASs) provide a solution for agile assembly, including a concept for reconfigurability with modularity at the mechanical as well as at the control level. It takes the multilateral relations among product, processes, and systems into account and allows the systems to evolve together with the requirements. Self-organizing assembly systems (SOASs) are a further development of EAS, allowing them to play an active role in layout design and production. This paper focuses on the self-organization mechanisms for the design of SOAS, as well as the system architecture, including agents and self-knowledge. Agentified modules participate in their own arrangement in the system layout and monitor themselves during production. Policies and metadata for self-management during production are described, and performance metrics for agility scenarios are indicated.