Production System Innovation Through Evolvability: Existing Challenges & Requirements

Recent mass-customization trends and increasing global competition has posed many challenges for the current manufacturing industry, particularly in Europe. Having a quick response to market fluctuations and adapting to customer demands while maintaining shorter lead times and low cost are a few of the major challenges. This paper focuses on Evolvable Production System (EPS), which is one of the emerging cyber physical systems in the manufacturing domain to address these challenges. The main objectives of this paper are: a) to identify the potential areas which may require modifications for the wide-scale implementation of the new manufacturing paradigms in the existing industrial setup, and b) to investigate the risks, challenges & opportunities associated with the concept realization in industry within each identified area. The results are derived based on both an extensive literature study as well as a survey carried out at an SME.