CPROSA-Holarchy: An enhanced PROSA model to enable worker-cobot agile manufacturing

This research combines two important concepts of intelligent manufacturing: agile manufacturing and collaborative robotics. On the one hand, agility in manufacturing is the capability of an industrial enterprise to respond rapidly and effectively to unanticipated changes that occur in the production. The aim of agile manufacturing is to proactively develop solutions to adapt to the customers' needs. These solutions are a result of collective decision-making that has been formed among the different entities of the agile manufacturing system. On the other hand, collaborative robotics is a new trend in industrial robotics, which involves a collaborative robot (cobot). A cobot is usually an industrial robot designed to operate safely in a shared work environment with human workers. This is in contrast with the conventional industrial robot that operates in isolation from the workers' workspace. One of the most important advantages of collaborative robotics is the increase of the agility of manufacturing. Therefore, in this research, we focus on developing a proper information control and communication solution to facilitate worker-cobot agile manufacturing. Furthermore, we introduce a case study of two workers in cooperation with one cobot to demonstrate the solution concept.