Towards industrial exploitation of innovative and harmonized production systems

Industrial competitiveness today means shorter product lifecycles, increased product variety and shorter time-to-market. To face this challenge, the manufacturing industry is forced by different initiatives, namely Internet of Things, Industrie 4.0 and Cyber-Physical System to move from traditional control approaches towards intelligent manufacturing control systems that are dynamically adaptable to changing production environment and flexible to different processing tasks. For years several emergent intelligent approaches such as Multi-Agent Systems, Service-oriented Architecture, Plug-and-Produce systems and Cloud technologies have been developed in a variety of research fields. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art methodologies and technologies of flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing systems outlining the differences between them and arising benefits within the vision of the PERFoRM (Production harmonizEd Reconfiguration of Flexible Robots and Machinery) project. Current trends and challenges in industrial implementation of these methodologies are reported and research opportunities are described.