Knowledge-based planning and adaptation of industrial automation systems

Product lifecycles are getting increasingly shorter, but the lifecycles of industrial automation systems remain stable. Since future requirements for the industrial automation systems made by the market are often unknown at the beginning of the planning process, industrial automation systems have to be adaptable at later times. In addition, the efforts of planning should be reduced continuously without losses in the quality in order to reduce costs. The aim of the approach presented in this paper is the development of an assistance system, which supports the planner during the planning and the adaptation of industrial automation systems by generating and evaluating different solution alternatives for the changed requirements and constraints. The implementation of the assistance system is based on a resource-based view of an industrial automation system and bottom-up planning which is realized with the help of a multi-agent system.