Hardware flexibility of laboratory automation systems: analysis and new flexible automation architectures.

Development of flexible laboratory automation systems has attracted tremendous attention in recent years as biotechnology scientists perform diverse types of protocols and tend to continuously modify them as part of their research. This article is a system level study of hardware flexibility of laboratory automation architectures for high-throughput automation of various sample preparation protocols. Hardware flexibility (system components' adaptability to protocol variations) of automation systems is addressed through the introduction of three main parametric flexibility measures functional, structural, and throughput. A new quantitative measurement method for these parameters in the realm of the Axiomatic Theory is introduced in this article. The method relies on defining probability of success functions for flexibility parameters and calculating their information contents. As flexibility information content decreases, automation system flexibility increases.