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Robust Manufacturing Control pp 355–369Cite as

Decentralized Manufacturing Systems Review: Challenges and Outlook

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Production Engineering ((LNPE))

Abstract

During the last three decades the economic landscape has abandoned its local characteristics and evolved into a global and highly competitive economy. The market demands towards high product variety, the low human labour costs in specific locations, the evolution of Information and Communication Technologies, and specific social and political forces are the principal reasons towards globalization. The main trend currently outlining the development of manufacturing paradigms is the ever-increasing tendency in the direction of decentralization of manufacturing functions towards decentralized entities. This has caused a fundamental reorganization process of the manufacturing organizations in order to cope with this trend. Several critical issues rise in the control and management of such organizations. These criticalities are further compounded by the need to achieve mass customization of industrial products, as this greatly complicates the manufacturing and supply activities. Moreover, the modalities for the configuration and implementation of each of the distributed manufacturing typologies are identified. The purpose of this paper is to specify the main trends, issues, and sensitive topics that characterize the behaviour and performance of these production systems. Based on this review, a discussion over existing production concepts is performed.

This contribution was previously published in Logistics Research (2012) pp. 113–121. DOI:10.1007/s12159-012-0085-x.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the EC funded project “A Web-based Collaboration System for Mass Customization – e-CUSTOM” (260067).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering/Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems and Automation (LMS), University of Patras, Patras, 26500, Greece

    Dimitris Mourtzis & Michalis Doukas

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  1. Dimitris Mourtzis
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  2. Michalis Doukas
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Correspondence to Dimitris Mourtzis .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Global Production Logistics - Internatio, Jacobs University Bremen, Campus Ring 1, Bremen, 28759, Germany

    Katja Windt

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Mourtzis, D., Doukas, M. (2013). Decentralized Manufacturing Systems Review: Challenges and Outlook. In: Windt, K. (eds) Robust Manufacturing Control. Lecture Notes in Production Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30749-2_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30749-2_26

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