Approaching Self-Organizing Production: Unwrapping the Potential of Empathy

Realizing self-organizing production in a distributed systems perspective remains a challenge to date. A promising phenomenon found in nature unfolds its potential in contexts similar to this. The mechanism of empathy is considered a foundational enabler for humans to appropriately adapt to varying demands of social situations. Aiming at approaching self-organizing production, we follow a bio-inspired design paradigm to enable a sound translation of the social model into reasonable designs. Whilst empathy contributes to specific parts, not the overall body of the problem, it provides a promising problem-potential-fit introducing a broader field of mechanisms with rich approaches for systems design.