• Electrolux
• EAS
• Ontology

This thesis is part of a research program which has the main goal to prove that the “Evolvable Paradigm” can be introduced with success in present industry, and in particular in the Assembly field. In the first chapter of this work we introduced a scheme, suitable for the Evolvable Assembly System setting. One of the most important aspect to consider in order to pass from a theoretical paradigm to a practical approach is the information management: all the necessary information should be provided by the Ontology. Therefore the first step has been to produce a General Ontology, which could be used like a framework for single applications. The way we chose to prove that the Evolvable Paradigm could be used successfully is to exhibit how, two very different products, from the same company (The ELECTROLUX®), could be assembled with the same referential system. It has been necessary to perform a DFAA analysis, which allowed to evaluate the products. After the first evaluation we introduced some modifications to improve the score (for automatic assembly) of such products. The further step has been to develop the Specific Ontologies for our Test case; of course the basic information came not only from the product requirements but also from discussions with peoples expert in assembly. At the end in the sixth chapter of this thesis a first attempt of the final layouts of the whole system is presented.