Elastic Manufacturing systems - a platform for dynamic, resilient and cost-effective manufacturing services

社会复杂性和气候变化、食品安全和人口老龄化等重大挑战的增长速度超过了我们设计下一代制造业基础设施的能力，这些基础设施能够提供应对这些挑战的产品和服务。拟议的计划旨在通过提出“弹性制造系统”的革命性新概念来解决这种差异，该概念将允许未来的制造业务作为基于动态资源需求和供应的服务交付，从而向完全不同的业务和成本模型开放制造。弹性制造系统概念借鉴了材料弹性/塑性行为的类似概念，允许确定制造系统可逆缩放程度的方法，以及开发具有高度弹性的系统的方法。该方法建立在最近在弹性计算资源分配中使用的方法之上，并借鉴了集体决策、认知系统智能和环境感知设备和仪器网络的原则。其结果将是制造系统能够以具有成本效益和可预测的方式交付具有可变体积和需求概况的高质量产品。我们将这项工作重点放在特定的高度监管的英国工业部门-航空航天，汽车和食品-因为由于监管限制，这些行业传统上在快速扩大产量和成本效益方面的能力有限。这项研究将遵循一种系统的方法，以确保在影响活动的支持下进行基础和变革性研究的综合方案。这项工作将从制定应用案例和场景开始，为核心研究发展提供信息。开发的通用模型和方法将通过基于实验室的试验台和工业试点进行实例化、测试和验证（S5）。我们的意图是，在工作计划的框架内，在我们的工业咨询委员会的指导下，在4年内定期审查研究，优先考虑和灵活资助。

Society complexity and grand challenges, such as climate change, food security and aging population, grow faster than our capacity to engineer the next generation of manufacturing infrastructure, capable of delivering the products and services to address these challenges. The proposed programme aims to address this disparity by proposing a revolutionary new concept of 'Elastic Manufacturing Systems' which will allow future manufacturing operations to be delivered as a service based on dynamic resource requirements and provision, thus opening manufacturing to entirely different business and cost models. The Elastic Manufacturing Systems concept draws on analogous notions of the elastic/plastic behaviour of materials to allow methods for determining the extent of reversible scaling of manufacturing systems and ways to develop systems with a high degree of elasticity. The approach builds upon methods recently used in elastic computing resource allocation and draws on the principles of collective decision making, cognitive systems intelligence and networks of context-aware equipment and instrumentation. The result will be manufacturing systems able to deliver high quality products with variable volumes and demand profiles in a cost effective and predictable manner. We focus this work on specific highly regulated UK industrial sectors - aerospace, automotive and food - as these industries traditionally are limited in their ability to scale output quickly and cost effectively because of regulatory constraints.The research will follow a systematic approach outlined in to ensure an integrated programme of fundamental and transformative research supported by impact activities. The work will start with formulating application cases and scenarios to inform the core research developments. The generic models and methods developed will be instantiated, tested and verified using laboratory based testbeds and industrial pilots (S5). It is our intention that - within the framework of the work programme - the research is regularly reviewed, prioritised and and flexibly funded across the 4 years, guided by our Industrial Advisory Board.