Network Analysis of Collaborative Cyber-Physical Multi-Agent Smart Manufacturing Systems

Cyber-physical systems feature the interplay of cyber-network intelligence and physical system dynamics. Agents of artificial intelligence making decisions based on observations result in physical interactions to form social networks in cyber and physical domains. In this paper, we introduce a multi-agent decision model which forms interactive social networks for multi-dimensional physical states and agent decisions. In particular, the cyber and physical interactions in a sequential smart manufacturing process are treated as a collaborative cyberphysical multi-agent system. As the social network topology influences both of the cyber behavior and physical dynamics, we investigate the impacts of different network topologies on the collective performance of cyber-physical system. Numerical results about smart factory uniquely uncover critical factors in the network design for collaborative cyber-physical systems.