Social Machines

Web-based socio-technical systems in which the human and technological elements play the role of participant machinery with respect to the mechanistic realization of system-level processes.

They are part of the Industrie 4.0 vision. The underlying idea is that machines share their knowledge like in social networks – information about themselves as well as experiences and lessons learned from their processes. At the same time, social machines coordinate the information received and learn from the network too. Similarly to Facebook users, they independently obtain information from the Internet and connected social machine networks. Through swarm experience, they are aware of the best parameters for machining a particular material, for example, and they exchange them with befriended machines.