Modern industrial production conditioned by the overall globalization, scientific, and technological achievements requires a new and systematic approach to the management and control of production systems. The traditional concepts of production systems, their hierarchical control, and management structure are not able to cope with the challenges brought by new production philosophy: Industry 4.0. In this chapter, a new approach was proposed in the structuring of production systems through the integration of cyber and physical environment in the elementary functional unit: elementary socio-cyber-physical work system (ESCPWS).
TopIntroduction
In the era of comprehensive globalization, the expansion of scientific and technological achievements, the industrial production occupies an important role in the global and European economy. Manufacturing represents 21% of GDP European Union (EU), while the number of jobs (more than 30 million employees in 230,000 companies) 20% applies to employees in the field of production (Horizon 2020, 2014). These data present the importance of production activities in the EU economy and highlight new approaches to finding and applying appropriate methods and technologies, in order to improve productivity and keep the competitiveness of manufacturing companies in the global market.
A novel approach to industrial production is needed, which would address new challenges and circumstances arising from escalating uncertainty, dynamism and complexity in industry-driven by turbulent market, political, economic and societal conditions (Hozdić & Butala, 2020).
Globalization and erasing borders bring new market opportunities, potential and challenges that require different characteristics of production systems. Production systems are now coming to grips with a wide range of management competence, structural independence, and communication in order to achieve competitiveness (Hozdić & Jurković, 2016).
A production philosophy, which emerges recently under the name Industry 4.0, opens space for novel approaches to industrial production. Industry 4.0 is driven by new discoveries of sciences, enriched knowledge, new and enhanced materials, and technologies, especially in the field of information and communication technologies. Besides, novel organizational forms and innovative managerial principles of emergence, self–organization, learning, open innovation, collaboration, and networking of humans and organizations will become the key elements of the next-generation manufacturing systems (Hozdić, Kozjek, & Butala, 2019).
In the last two or three decades, several influencing attempts to reshaping industrial production have been published, which can be recognized as cornerstones of Industry 4.0. With the effort of adapting manufacturing and its systems to the time in which they exist, new manufacturing approaches integrating new manufacturing systems with new business models and architectures have emerged (Jovane, Koren, & Boer, 2003).
For development of new decentralized concepts of production systems strategic document of the EU “Factories of the Future” (Horizon 2020, 2014) focuses on the development of technology, innovation in production equipment on the level of machines and systems, including mechatronic systems, the development of methods for monitoring, control and a control of production systems.
Recently, a new approach is emerging in terms of a cyber-physical production system (CPPS) (Monostori, 2014), which upgrades in a way the mentioned attempts. It originates from the concept of cyber-physical systems (CPS) (Gill, 2006), and links physical and virtual components of a production system into a coherent whole (Lee, 2008). Production systems from the perspective CPS partially deviate from traditional automation pyramid (Monostori, 2014), (Monostori et al., 2016), introducing a more decentralized way of functioning, compared to the traditional hierarchical structure (Karnouskos et al., 2012).