A neuroendocrine-inspired bionic manufacturing system

Due to rapid changes of markets and pressures of competitions, the manufacturing companies are forced to adapt their production ways to support diversity of customer’s needs and increase of new product developments. As biological organisms are quite capable of adapting to environmental changes and stimulus, bio-inspired concepts have been recognized much suitable for adaptive manufacturing system control. This paper, therefore, proposes a novel concept of NeuroEndocrine-Inspired Manufacturing System (NEIMS). The proposed NEIMS control architecture is based on analogies with neuro-control and hormone-regulation principles. It has the capability to explicitly specify production control schemes including control points, material, information flow paths and logical operations, and to agilely deal with the frequent occurrence of unexpected disturbances at the shop floor level. From the cybernetics point of view, the control model of NEIMS indicates adaptive behavior to the changes in products demands due to external environment and malfunction of manufacturing cells as an internal environment. Finally, a prototype system has been set up to enable the NEIMS simulation.