Advanced Manufacturing: An Industrial Application for Collective Adaptive Systems

Driven by market trends towards highly-personalised products, the manufacturing industry is facing a variety of challenges that require systems to be adaptive, robust, resilient, and responsive. Collective adaptive systems have the potential to provide solutions to a wide variety of these problems. This paper has two main aims: to highlight shared problems between industry and the collective adaptive systems research area, where solutions would enable a transformative impact on the manufacturing domain, and to generate discussion around the application of collective adaptive systems approaches to facilitate further adoption of such techniques in industry. This paper therefore focusses on a real-world industrial manufacturing scenario that is to be used as a demonstration to investigate the application of collective adaptive systems to the manufacturing domain. A number of key issues are discussed, along with a number of potential approaches, with the hope of generating further discussion.