Architecture for Production Internet.

Production Internet as a large-scale virtual ecosystem of interacting clients, firms and Things considers the structures of products and services along the inter-organizational coordination, consequently going beyond the peer-to-peer networking and enabling both horizontal and extended vertical integration of operations. This paper proposes architecture for Production Internet, which is suited to the large scale, dispersion, heterogeneity, and complexity of operations. The mechanisms of coordination rely on externalized governance and are derived from the known theories of dynamic behaviour in networks. By combining ecosystem-wide intelligence with performance measurement, a setup was designed for adaptive control of orders and maintenance of homeostasis, as well as to aid evolution. All these functionalities are embodied into the architecture through a distributed, agent-based and heterarchical solution. The proposed approach aims to improve overall performance, considering the turnover and efficiency of resources, the ‘price of anarchy’, and the Pareto optimality.