Towards Flexible Process Automation

Abstract

The dynamic of today's markets demand automation systems that are flexible enough for being adapted to rapid requirement changes. The presented work describes how to make robotic systems more flexible in order to cope with changing processes, products, and environments. We propose flexibilizing service robot task modeling and assignment by coupling them with process management systems and utilize them similarly to human workers. Additionally, a variability management workflow is presented, for not fixing systems at design-time. Instead, variability is left open intentionally and reduced gradually. The combination of these two approaches enables users (e.g. workers) to adapt their robot systems to requirement changes by user-friendly tools and provides flexible service robot allocation.