A Structural Analysis of Emerging Production Systems

A cornerstone of modern production paradigms is the encapsulation of heterogeneity and system complexity. This functional encapsulation is supported by distinct architectural building blocks that once instantiated abstract, manage and control a specific system. Modern production approaches rely in semi hierarchical architectures to organize the interactions between these blocks. In runtime this specific structure promotes a self-organizing response resulting from concurrent interaction between the system's components. This paper simulates the execution of processes in a network of mechatronic agents comprising products, processes' abstractions and resources and analyses the impact of the typical network structure envisioned by modern production paradigms in respect to the time consumed in the production process.