Exploring the network dimension of diagnosis in Evolvable Production Systems

Modern Production Paradigms, supported by state-of-art developments in IT, present major opportunities for the effective implementation of sustainable shop floors. With an increased focus in seamless system reconfiguration most proposals advocate the use of modular and distributed architectures that are dynamic compositions (adaptable and evolvable structures) of cooperating self-contained entities that interact using complex communication patterns with enhanced semantics. These design principles introduce significant diagnostic challenges. The distributed and contained nature of the information renders collective fault events harder to track. Furthermore, current approaches that are adjusted to a more conservative logic-based control, do not provide an adequate response to this problem. This paper proposes an approach to capture the network dynamics of faults in the emergent domain of Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) which implements and extends the before-mentioned characteristics.