Evolvable Production Systems: A Coalition-Based Production Approach

Introduction

To obtain sustainability, an organism, organization, or system must align itself with its environment. For a company this means that it has to position its internal capabilities and capacity with regards to its competitors and customers, and naturally to the laws and regulations it is governed by. This act of positioning is a dynamical one, i.e. both the environment and the company are constantly changing, which means that a company’s fitness with regards to its environment must continuously be assessed in order to remain fit. The process can in its simplest form be seen as an iterative Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop: (1) observe both the environment and the internal processes and states, (2) assessed the internal and external possibilities, (3) decide what to do, (4) act on the previously made decisions, (5) observe the effects of the actions, et cetera. A company must continuously observe and orient itself and its environment to know what to do, weather it is internal or external.

Logically there are two ways to remain fit, either by internal alterations to the company and its internal subsystems, or by altering the environment, e.g. through marketing, purchasing and selling of companies, creation of new markets. The internal alterations are a key purpose for much of the manufacturing system toy, while the external alterations to the environment, although strongly interrelated, mainly belong to other scientific areas such as economics and marketing. The day to day work for production engineers is focused either on maintaining status quo in production or on aligning the production system to the changes that occur in its environment. For rigid systems and systems that operate in a non-dynamic environment, the difficulty of maintaining the status quo of the system is dependent on the complexity of the task that should be performed, which is strongly related to the internal complexity of the system. For dynamic systems that operate in a dynamic environment, the complexity is both related to the internal complexity of the system and the complexity of the environment.

Since the environment of production systems is becoming more and more dynamic with shorter product life-cycles and increased demands for customization, the production systems themselves must be able to answer to these requirements. There is consequently little room left for rigid manufacturing systems, and a strong demand for sustainable and adaptive production system that can change in accordance with its environment. As a result, the new generation of production systems must be able to handle the additional environmental complexity. This, in addition to the internal complexity, will challenge our already strained ability to handle system complexity, and may require a radically new structure for design and operation of production systems.

There is a strong correlation between complexity and cost, which means that the initial cost for a sustainable production system is more expensive than for more rigid system. In turn, this means that the payback for a rigid system will be shorter as long as the system does not become obsolete before it breaks even. However, the long term profitability of a system is decided by more parameters than the initial cost; key issues include for example the dynamical fit between the system and its environment; system set-up, implementation, maintenance and change over time. It is therefore imperative to advance the assessment of long term profitability of a sustainable production system to facilitate their implementation in a competitive industrial environment.