Context-sensitive Adaptive Production Processes

To stay competitive, manufacturing companies need to adapt their processes in a regular basis to the most recent conditions in their corresponding domains. These adaptations are typically the result of turbulences, such as changes in human resources, new technological advancements, or economic crises. Therefore, to increase the efficiency of production processes, (i) automation, (ii) optimization, and (iii) dynamic adaptation became the most important requirements in this field. In this work, we propose a novel process modelling and execution approach for creating self-organizing processes: Production processes are extended by context-sensitive execution steps, for which sub-processes are selected, elected, optimized, and finally executed on runtime. During the election step, the most desired solution is chosen and optimized based on selection and optimization strategies of the respective processes. Moreover, we present a system architecture for modelling and executing these context-sensitive production processes.