A Novel Industrial Software Model for Social Manufacturing

Distinct from the conventional manufacturing paradigm, the functioning of the Social Manufacturing (SocialM) model relies on a vast and dispersed array of social manufacturing resources. SocialM communities/groups emerge autonomously through business interactions, resource self-organization, and production information sharing, all driven by product orders within the SocialM system. This necessitates a more open, distributed, and autonomous software model to facilitate the allocation and operation of social manufacturing resources in support of the SocialM model. Consequently, this paper introduces a novel software development model designed specifically for SocialM. This proposed model employs business interaction software as the system’s primary control portal, enabling efficient management of resources and users based on the social manufacturing communities/ groups. Additionally, it facilitates the administration and oversight of numerous applications by utilizing an industrial Appstore. Moreover, the paper delves into the technological roadmap for realizing the essential technologies of the software model by integrating multi-agent and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) technologies. A 3D printing task simulation case was employed to demonstrate the model’s working principle, which served to confirm the reliability and scalability of the SocialM software, as well as the feasibility of the SocialM theory.