Open manufacturing: a design-for-resilience approach

Abstract

Open systems have been of interest to the research and industrial community for decades, e.g. software development, telecommunication, and innovation. The presence of open manufacturing enterprises in a cloud calls for broadly interpretable models. Though there is no global standard for representation of digital models of processes and systems in a cloud, the existing process modelling methodologies and languages are of interest to the manufacturing cloud. The models residing in the cloud need to be configured and reconfigured to meet different objectives, including complexity reduction and interpretability which coincide with the resilience requirements. Digitisation, greater openness, and growing service orientation of manufacturing offer opportunities to address resilience at the design rather than the operations stage. An algorithm is presented for complexity reduction of digital models. The complexity reduction algorithm decomposes complex structures and enhances interpretability and visibility of their components. The same algorithm and its variants could serve other known concepts supporting resilience such as modularity of products and processes as well as delayed product differentiation. The ideas introduced in the paper and the complexity reduction algorithm of digital models are illustrated with examples. Properties of the graph and matrix representations produced by the algorithm are discussed.