Open Access

In the era of Industry 4.0 and individualized mass customization, the demand for adaptable manufacturing systems is paramount. In this paper, we explore the integration of autonomic computing and self-organization in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) to meet the dynamic needs of modern manufacturing. Our work focuses on implementing and testing self-organization within an assembly process, utilizing a production cell equipped with both industrial robots and mobile robots capable of dynamic movement and reconfiguration. A highlight of the production cell is that the processing resources self-organize into teams for executing assembly steps. Our novel approach to representing assembly plans in an FMS allows for a high degree of flexibility in executing assembly processes. Specifically, we emphasize flexibility regarding the ordering and prioritizing of assembly steps, the allocation of appropriate teams of robots to execute these steps with applicable parts, and the ability to respond to failures in the system. We present a comprehensible modeling of flexible assembly plans, accompanied by the semantics of Petri nets, illustrated by example, and comparatively evaluated against other approaches.