Abstract

There are two important aspects that will play important roles in future manufacturing systems: changeability and human-machine collaboration. The first aspect, changeability, concerns with the ability of production tools to reconfigure themselves to the new manufacturing settings, possibly with unknown prior information, while maintaining their reliability at lowest cost. The second aspect, human-machine collaboration, emphasizes the ability of production tools to put themselves on the position as humans’ co-workers. The interplay between these two aspects will not only determine the economical accomplishment of a manufacturing process, but it will also shape the future of the technology itself. To address this future challenge of manufacturing systems, the concept of Cognitive Factory was proposed. Along this line, machines and processes are equipped with cognitive capabilities in order to allow them to assess and increase their scope of operation autonomously. However, the technical implementation of such a concept is still widely open for research, since there are several stumbling blocks that limit practicality of the proposed methods. In this paper, we introduce our method to achieve the goal of the Cognitive Factory. Our method is inspired by the working mechanisms of a human’s brain; it works by harnessing the reasoning capabilities of cognitive architecture. By utilizing such an adaptive reasoning mechanism, we envision the future manufacturing systems with cognitive intelligence. We provide illustrative examples from our current research work to demonstrate that our proposed method is notable to address the primary issues of the Cognitive Factory: changeability and human-machine collaboration.