Experimental study of work system networking in production environment

In the context of distributed manufacturing, existing models for the management of orders and work systems assume that the entirety of information about the state of the production environment is known. Instead, this paper studies the implications of networking in an environment in which no element possesses information about the entire state. An experiment in the form of a production simulation game is designed and carried out to explore the emergence and behaviour of such a network. Network structure and dynamics as well as the social aspects of networking are discussed and evaluated. (C) 2014 CIRP.