Are traditional centralised and hierarchical structures too cumbersome for the digital age? Would a radical (and controversial) view to solving the shop-floor scheduling and control problem be better?
With the rise of digital manufacturing technologies and Industry 4.0, many are considering whether current methods for scheduling and controlling (and ultimately decision making) will be able to harness the capabilities and power that the proposed fourth industrial revolution with bring. The key question to manufacturers will be asking themselves is whether they can provide excellent customer service through high customisation at a high service-level. This will create an extremely complex and volatile environment.
Anarchic Manufacturing proposes a solution that creates an emergent highly productive and adaptive manufacturing society based on low level system element interactions only. By using a free market architecture to facilitate the consumers’ (customer and job) purchasing of goods and services (components and manufacturing operations) from providers (resources), efficiencies and self-adapting traits should emerge; solving the manufacturer’s management problem.
Anarchic Manufacturing systems challenges the adage ‘simplify to improve’, by creating more chaos to solve complex problems.