Features
- Digital Presence: Being able to create digital or cyber-physical models of parts or the complete manufacturing system to develop a simulation environment for advanced planning, decision support and validation capability, before any action is implemented physically.
- Modularity: Being able to create ‘‘economies of scale’’ within the manufacturing system.
- Scalability: Being able to adjust (e.g. increase) production capacity through the manufacturing system reconfiguration with minimal cost and in minimal time.
- Fully Automated: Being able to fully control by means of a computer system parts or the complete manufacturing system.
- Robustness: Being able to cope with problems during production as a manufacturing. Robustness can be achieved through redundancy.
- Agility: Being able to respond to external changes (e.g. market changes) that affect production plans.
- Resilience: Being able to tolerate large perturbations during production and still achieve production goals.
- Decentralized: Being able to allow the components or subsystems of a manufacturing system to operate on local information to accomplish global production goals.
- Integrability: Being able to bring together different component subsystems (e.g. machine tools, robots, computer systems, humans) of a manufacturing system into one integrated system and ensuring that all the sub-systems function together as a coordinated whole.
- Proactivity: Being able to anticipate (predict), by means of continuous situation-awareness capabilities, events (e.g. problems) in the production or manufacturing system components (e.g. machine tool) and react ahead of time (e.g. proactive maintenance).