Mitigating Conflicts in Architectural Design Decisions for Evolving Manufacturing Systems: Evaluation and Recommendations for Practitioners

abstract

The design process for manufacturing systems involves different architectural design decisions (ADDs), including deploying software to hardware components, determining shopfloor topology, and planning production tasks for stations. These ADDs exhibit complex interactions, where the synthesis of one ADD impacts other ADDs, highlighting the need to investigate their dynamic interplay. However, current research prioritizes individual ADDs over exploring multiple ADDs together. This work investigates a multi-dimensional design space exploration (DSE) of deployment, shop-floor topology, and production planning ADDs. We introduce mitigation constraints to ensure the compatibility among these ADDs. To evaluate our approach, we apply it to a flexible manufacturing line demonstrator. Furthermore, we assess and compare various DSE workflows, providing preliminary guidance to software architects on mitigating conflicts and enhancing the quality of ADDs.