Design space exploration (DSE) of cyber-physical production systems (CPPSs) is a search problem in the space of potential compositional configurations. 

Current design methodologies follow the separated design paradigm in which the architecture, control, and scheduling are separately designed. Optimization of each part considers only the corresponding goals of interest and overlooks other aspects by adopting gross assumptions, which makes it difficult to determine the global optimal solution for a given system.

A research team led by Zeng Peng from Shenyang institute of automation, Chinese academy of sciences (SIACAS) proposed a new codesign approach to achieve more efficient manufacturing system.

Zeng's team proposed a codesign method that considers the design spaces of architecture, control and scheduling as monolithic, mixed discrete-continuous spaces. They formulate DSE as an optimization problem and propose a generic iterative algorithm scheme involving simulation in  the loop to solve the above new problem.

General idea of the codesign schema

Based on this design approach, they take an energy-efficient system for reducer production to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results reveal that the codesign method indeed yields higher quality solutions than those yielded by the conventional method. In their study, the new approach can both performance of makespan and energy consuming by 11% and 16.7% respectively.

Their study was published on IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.