Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Manufacturing systems of the future need to have flexible re-sources and flexible routing to produce extremely personalizedproducts, even of lot size equal to one. In this paper we haveproposed a framework, which is designed to achieve this goal.Towards this we have integrated an established cultural evolu-tion model to achieve desirable flexibility of resources and ac-ceptable routing time. Promising results are evidenced througha simple proof-of-concept agent-based simulation. The simu-lation results reveal that the products need to move less in morediversified cultural groups when looking for suitable resources.It was also observed that the more time we provide for culturaldissemination, the cultural groups become increasingly coher-ent due to homophily. For scenarios, which require diversifica-tion of resources, we need to find a balance between coherenceand diversification. This paper provides first insights into theseaspects for a production shop floor.