Distributed control for Industry 4.0 -A comparative simulation study

Abstract The recent decades have seen various market changes that industrial manufactures need to address. Increasing individualization of products and rapid demand fluctuations require new control approaches. In this article, we study the performance of centralized and distributed control approaches with regard to work in progress in a make-to-order environment. We utilize a multi-agent system in a discrete-event simulation to model several control approaches and provide various insights into potential benefits of distributed control concepts given rapidly fluctuating manufacturing demand.