A Management Framework for Autonomous and Intelligent Resources in Distributed Manufacturing Systems: A Fractal-based Approach

摘要

Up-to-date market dynamics and intense competition have forced a manufacturing system to be more widely distributed and decentralized than ever. A manufacturing system itself can be regarded as a collaborative network of autonomous manufacturing resources in which the responsibility of decision making is also decentralized into individual entities. Therefore, problem complexity of resource management has been drastically increased. In this paper, a novel resource management framework that applies a fractal-based approach to an organizing mechanism of distributed and decentralized manufacturing resources is investigated. The fractal-based approach implies self-similar and recursive processes. Especially, an employment contract-driven resource management model is proposed, in which a virtual employment relationship between manufacturing resources is recursively deployed into overall manufacturing systems. The proposed model reduces problem complexity by means of iterative decomposition of problems in resource management.