Background
What is anticipated to be the 4th industrial revolution offers a vision of a smart and cyber-physical factory. Such a factory will be composed by many intelligent cyber-physical components which will be able to constantly adjust their operation depending on the production requirements and context. These components will be able to understand and communicate with each other and will be able to take over each others roles dynamically in case of faults and failures. They will constantly collect system information which they will use to improve and adjust their own operation.
The smart factory can therefore produce an infinite amount of different products and because robots, stations, tools, conveyor systems, agv’s,… are plug and produce; the factory can be instantly reconfigured to adapt to the new products. The system setup and ramp-up times are virtually zero. The technology for creating such a factory is being developed today and in this course the students have a unique opportunity to learn from well renowned experts what are technologies, the design principles, the current state of development and the challenges in such an exciting area of research and development.
Goal
After the course the participants will be able to:
- Discuss the vision and the main challenges related to the fourth industrial revolution (also known as Industry 4.0) and the main research initiatives in this area.
- Understand the main design and implementation principles that support cyber-physical production system and the system that motivate Industry 4.0.
- Understand what why a cyber-physical system is different from today’s conventional system.
- Understand the requirements on the computational and physical infrastructures required to support such a system.
- Design a simple cyber-physical production system.
- Use at a basic level the main technologies supporting such systems:
- Understand how to use today’s technologies to create an industrial cyber-physical system.
- Use Intelligent Agents as a mechanism to design the cyber part of a cyber-physical system.
Content
The course has two parts. The introductory part where the students are taught about the supporting technologies, in particular multi-agent based programming, required to create the cyber-part of a cyber-physical system. This first part will cover all the basics and assumes no previous knowledge on the area.
The second part focuses on more advanced system design and implementation aspects and where the students are able to articulate the theoretical framework with the practical implementation. The second part also introduced the cyber-physical design where cyber entities created in the first part of the course are applied to physical systems.
Target audience
The course targets PhD students and practitioners with any engineering background. A very basic notion of programming is advisable but not required.
Organisation of the course
The course will run intensively during 7 days from 8:00 to 17:00. The preliminary scheduling can be found under “Scheduling”. The course is composed by a 2 day introductory part and a 5 day main part. Different invited lectures will hold different learning activities. Each learning moment is composed by and introductory part that provides the theoretical background followed by a practical part where the students apply what they have learnt on the theoretical part. The main part of the course has two running tracks a beginners and an advanced track. The students will attend only one based on their initial level of skills.
Literature
The literature will be distributed by the different lecturers during the course
Examination / Examiner
Students at Linköping University enrolling on the the course as a LiU PhD course will be granted 6 credits upon successful completion of all the following tasks/assignments:
- Course attendance (full course): 1,5 credits
- Approval on the practical exercises: 1,5 credits
- Final written assignment consisting on a 4000 word essay summarizing the new scientific and technical knowledge acquired: 3 credits