Conceptualization of Cultural Diversity for Efficient and Flexible Manufacturing Systems of the Future

Manufacturing systems of the future need to have flexible resources and flexible routing to produce extremely personalized products, even of lot size equal to one. In this paper we have proposed a framework, which is designed to achieve this goal. Towards this we have integrated an established cultural evolution model to achieve desirable flexibility of resources and acceptable routing time. Promising results are evidenced through a simple proof-of-concept agent-based simulation. The simulation results reveal that the products need to move less in more diversified cultural groups when looking for suitable resources. It was also observed that the more time we provide for cultural dissemination, the cultural groups become increasingly coherent due to homophily. For scenarios, which require diversification of resources, we need to find a balance between coherence and diversification. This paper provides first insights into these aspects for a production shop floor.