Collaborative Digitalisation and the Future of Networked Production: Exploring Decentralised Technical Intelligence in Supply Chains

Networked production, supported by advanced logistics and supply chain processes, is crucial for companies to stay competitive and foster cooperation and integration of production resources. It replaces sequential processes with dynamic arrangements, presenting challenges like managing product variants, short life cycles, and process optimisation. Agility is vital for adapting to changes and natural disasters. Decentralised Technical Intelligence (DTI) is an approach that manages complexity and incentivises integrating new technologies in planning and manufacturing. DTI involves distributed and autonomous intelligence embedded in interconnected systems, where humans and machines collaborate to achieve common goals. Humans bring unique skills like creativity and intuition, complementing AI’s capabilities. DTI relies on a multi-agent architecture, enabling trust, interoperability, and data sharing for better decision-making and efficiency. The EU knowlEdge project exemplifies this by providing AI solutions that are distributed, secure, standardised, and collaborative, integrating cognitive technologies, data analytics, IoT and more. DTI’s human-centric design fosters a different quality of intelligence, leading to greater autonomy within multi-agent systems. To realise advanced networked production, a roadmap must be implemented, focusing on a vision, value promise, and development pathway. Europe can maintain its leadership in future networked production through this approach.