Implementing Altruistic Collaborative Healing in Smart Manufacturing: Context, Simulation, and Analysis

The rapid transformation of manufacturing companies and frequent market disruptions have significantly increased the complexity of industrial engineering process design. To address these challenges, innovative approaches such as biologicalisation—the integration of biological principles into manufacturing processes—are emerging. Building on this research direction, our research group has been developing the concept of “altruistic collaborative healing.” This concept envisions manufacturing elements capable of sharing resources or capabilities (“Donors”) with elements in need (“Recipients”), ensuring uninterrupted task performance. While the foundation of this concept is established, several critical elements remain unexplored. This paper contributes in three key areas. First, it expands the theoretical framework by examining altruism in animal species and comparing altruistic collaborative healing to traditional self-healing maintenance approaches. Second, it provides a systematic guideline for implementing the altruistic concept through robotic simulation tools (Robotic Operating System2). Finally, the concept is validated in an energy-sharing scenario, showing advantages over manual methods. The framework was tested by simulating a mobile robot’s movement between recipient and altruistic positions using mobile robot simulation packages and altruistic algorithms. These simulations were compared to a scenario involving manual battery exchange, demonstrating the model’s efficiency and important downtime reduction.