Analyzing the cyber-physical system–based autonomous collaborations among smart manufacturing resources in a smart shop floor

Industry 4.0 focuses on the realization of smart manufacturing from shop floors to factories and to the whole supply chain. As a key technology of smart manufacturing, cyber-physical system has been widely discussed in the aspects of system design, data collection and processing, and cyber-physical synchronization. In a smart shop floor, manufacturing resources with intelligence and autonomy are abstracted as cyber-physical system units. They can communicate with each other autonomously to make optimal production decisions according to the real-time status of the shop floor. In this article, an autonomous collaboration network comprised of cyber-physical system–based smart manufacturing resources is modeled by using complex network theory. The collaboration activities among them are further analyzed, from which the information of key cyber-physical system units and key collaboration relationships are excavated. A demonstrative case is studied to verify the feasibility of the proposed model. From the case, it can be seen that (1) autonomous collaboration network has a small-world feature; (2) cyber-physical system units with bigger degrees and the collaborative relationships with bigger tightness are more important; (3) the workload of cyber-physical system units needs to be balanced because some cyber-physical system units have exceeded their capacities; and (4) cyber-physical system units with larger collaboration clustering coefficients will attract other nodes to form communities centered by them. Based on these results, the autonomous production control and management of smart shop floor will become more accurate, efficient, and balanced.