XPRESS is providing a radical innovation by a completely new scalable concept:
-the “Manufactronic factory”
The key properties are knowledge and responsibility segregation (specialisation) and trans-sectoral process learning in specialist knowledge networks.
The “Manufactronic factory” is a co-ordinated team of specialised autonomous objects (“Manufactron”), each knowing how to do a certain process optimally.
This team of “Manufactrons” is co-ordinated by “workflow Manufactrons”, which are automatically generated in order to meet the need for an intelligent production line configuration.
Communicating machines will be developed using self-organising and self-learning algorithms, data mining, artificial intelligence and adaptable common interfaces. By sharing the specific knowledge of each “Manufactron” in a knowledge network system, other “Manufactrons” are able to benefit and learn from each other.
The intrinsic quality assurance and permanent process learning concepts yield to continuous optimum results.
This generic idea can be transferred to nearly all production processes and is therefore not restricted to the assembly processes demonstrated in XPRESS.