Smart, simulation-based resource sharing in federated production networks

Abstract The rise of Industry 4.0 and the convergence of the digital and physical worlds increasingly, where not radically, transforms the production networks. The paper presents the preliminary results of a distributed collaboration framework developed with the aim to facilitate the cooperation of various production sites. The objective is to manage a network of manufacturers who can dynamically re-configure and share their resources within a pre-registered community and analyze how the cardinality of the federation influences both the cooperation and the global and local production KPI-s. The novelty of the concept is the combination of the agent-based control, the matching algorithm combined with the detailed digital simulation of the distributed production systems and the collaborative IT platform.