Bio-inspired self-organised mechatronic-agent interactions to support product emergence

The emergence of modern manufacturing paradigms together with the growing interest on distributed architectures has been increasing the use of biologically inspired solutions. However, somehow along the way, developed approaches have converged towards more traditional systems where the physical and logical decoupled nature of the system has been partially lost. In this context, the presented work aims to introduce and analyse a new fully physically and logically decoupled bio-inspired self-organising approach that tries to bring to the mechatronic-agent based manufacturing architectures the dynamics of biological systems. Furthermore, the manufacturing systems are approached from a bottom-up perspective in an attempt to reduce the specification of the production processes to the minimum.