Characterization of Costs and Strategies for Automation in Evolvable Production Systems

The rise of global competition and the demands for mass customization observed in recent years are the main shaping forces of the manufacturing domain. Current approaches to industrial production automation are not suitable to cope with the resulting increasing requirement in term of system agility and sustainability. While a quite large amount of innovative and sound technical solutions for automation address such an issue, it is not clear how the new generation of automatic production system will be economically connoted. This work proposes a first step towards an economical characterization of the Evolvable Paradigm: one among the most promising aforementioned innovative industrial automation technologies. A basic description of the state-of-the-art of the related Evolvable Assembly/Production System allows inferring a cost model able to account for such an installation. This, in turn, enable a quantitative description of how the focal innovative approach enables a more effective and rational use of industrial automation.