Innovative Quality Management System for Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

The next generation of industry; Industry 4.0, holds the promise of increased flexibility in manufacturing, along with mass customization, better quality and improved productivity. In the Industry 4.0 era, manufacturing systems are able to monitor physical processes and make smart decisions through real-time communication and cooperation with humans, machines, sensors, and so forth. Intelligent manufacturing is based on this concept of optimizing manufacturing by taking advantage of technological advances. Flexible manufacturing systems are a form of intelligent manufacturing. A Flexible Manufacturing System reacts to changes in the production process, this includes changes in the product and the production schedule. The problem is that a traditional Quality Management System cannot be used for a Flexible Manufacturing Systems because it cannot keep up with the changes in the FMS. The aim of the project is to design, construct and evaluate an Intelligent Quality Management System (QMS) which can learn, and adapt to the change of the flexible manufacturing system (FMS). It will be able to do this by designing hardware nodes that can be easily added to already implemented test systems that convey information back to an Intelligent Quality Management System that would learn the line lay out and setup with predefined training cycles. Thereafter it should run as a Quality Management System until the flexible system necessitates a retrain.