Designing decision-making authorities for smart factories

Procedia CIRP, vol. 93, pp. 316–322

Abstract

Smart factories are an appealing vision, addressing ever increasing challenges in industry. Driven by advances in microcontroller, sensor and networking technologies, all entities, such as machines, products, load carriers, within a smart factory could become intelligent and able to assess their own situation and to attain their own goals successfully. However, local decision may exacerbate achieving global logistics performance due to the entities intrinsic selfishness. In this paper, we explore the trade-off between local decision-making and global performance management and derive first guidelines for the situation-specific design of a distributed control authority for smart factories.

Authors 2

1. Oliver Antons Aachen Chair of Management Science

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Management Science, RWTH Aachen University, Kackertstrae 7, 52072 Aachen, Germany

2. Julia C. Arlinghaus corresponding

   Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg

   Affiliation as printed

   Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Universittsplatz 2, 31904 Magdeburg, Germany