The challenges in modelling of "industry 4.0"-compliant manufacturing systems

Modern manufacturing systems that follow the "Industry 4.0" philosophy reject the traditional understanding of the factory as an entity placed in the time and the space. The introduction of the Virtual Enterprises (VE) and Virtual Manufacturing Networks (VMN) has increased the complexity of interconnections between the resources involved in the production process. This fact is also reflected in the complexity of models of such systems, especially if the system should be considered at different levels of generality. What's more, the components of such system and their roles can change during the time, as the result of system's self-organizing capability. These changes could have different rate and intensity, and these parameters play important role during the selection of the methodology of modelling. The paper raises the problem of modelling of such systems in several aspects, like variability of the structure or the system's analysis depth. The considerations will also take into account the methods based on the agents and holons methodologies and their usefulness in modelling from the point of view of the need to quickly change the scale of the model.