Bio-Inspired Self-Organising Methodologies for Production Emergence

With the emergence of new modern manufacturing paradigms new concepts, originally from the complexity sciences started to be introduced in the manufacturing systems, rendering traditional control approaches insufficient. Therefore, new approaches were developed, supported by the modern manufacturing paradigms bio-inspired background. However, somehow along the way the physical and logical nature of the system was partially lost, leading to the convergence of approaches towards more traditional systems, 'neglecting' their bio-inspired principles.

With the present work the authors aim to introduce and analyse two new different self-organising approaches that try to bring the focus of manufacturing systems, again to the bio-inspired principles. For this purpose, in the context of this work, manufacturing systems are approached from a bottom-up perspective, in an attempt to reduce the specification of the production processes to the minimum and foster the production emergence. A test case is considered, to draw initial conclusions.