A collaborative Plug&Produce system is a flexible, modular, and reconfigurable system that helps cope with fluctuating market demands. The idea is to be able to reconfigure the production line in minutes instead of hours or days. This reconfiguration is made by adding or removing a module to achieve different manufacturing goals. Guaranteeing the safety of this system is a crucial question in achieving the desired flexibility, as any change in the system requires a new risk assessment. The risk assessment process is still conducted manually, and it is a time-consuming process. This thesis work is a part of several studies carried out at University West to create an automated method to conduct the risk assessment in a way compatible with the collaborative Plug&Produce system. In University West studies, the Plug&Produce system is controlled by a Configurable Multi-Agent System (C-MAS). Particularly, in this thesis work, a concept is developed to automatically generate the hazardous zones of the collaborative Plug&Produce system to facilitate the process of hazards identification during the risk assessment process after every reconfiguration. The needed data to generate the hazardous zones are related to two systems. The first system is the collaborative robot system, where “Speed and separation monitoring” is the collaborative method used in this work. A protective separation distance (PSD) will be maintained between the robot and the operator to avoid collisions. The second system is the Plug&Produce system controlled by C-MAS, where the system consists of parts and resources. The parts have goals to be implemented, and the resources have the skills to implement the parts' goals. The resources have different variables that help describe the resources and ensure the compatibility between the resources to perform a particular sequence of skills called a process plan. These resource variables are saved in a database and help generate the hazardous zones. Additional data related to the Plug&Produce system controlled by C-MAS is also needed to generate the zones, such as the table of the identified hazards and data about the hazardous zones of the adjacent modules.

The hazardous zones are represented in this work as bounding volumes describe the volumetric occupancy of the robot’s moving link. The cuboids are chosen as bounding volumes to represent the hazardous zones.The developed concept is tested on a cell to produce a wooden walls simulation created in Robot Studio. Two process plans that perform the same goals are used in this test, and the results have been compared and discussed to validate the proposed concept.