Anarchic Manufacturing: Toward Complete Decentralisation of Production Systems

In this seminar, we will explore anarchic manufacturing, an extremely distributed planning and control philosophy, as the methodology for planning and controlling future smart factories. Anarchic manufacturing delegates decision-making authority and autonomy to the lowest level of entities in system elements with no centralised control or oversight. It is often postulated that traditional hierarchical structures may not be well suited to manage the state-of-the-art hyper-connected smart factories due to their reliance on communication between management layers. Distributed systems, on the other hand, are commonly perceived to be inherently more flexible, robust and adaptable than hierarchical systems due to their structure. In this seminar we characterise distributed systems by evaluating the relative flexibility of a representative hierarchical system against an anarchic system in various scenarios.