Modeling and analyzing of an enterprise relationship network in the context of social manufacturing

Under the circumstance of servitization in industry, the increasing service demands of manufacturing processes promote more service-oriented collaborations. Many small and medium enterprises start to provide professional manufacturing services for the product manufacturers, but the disorganization of these distributed enterprises has obstructed the collaboration decision making and led them to inferior positions when bargaining with the core product manufacturers. In this article, a new networked manufacturing mode called social manufacturing is proposed to solve this problem. Its concept and implementary architecture are discussed. Furthermore, a social manufacturing-oriented enterprise relationship network is built to well organize plenty of distributed enterprises. The topology model of the proposed social manufacturing-oriented enterprise relationship network is discussed, and an improved clustering algorithm is proposed to implement the clustering of enterprises based on the enterprise similarity, which would aggregate enterprises into horizontal manufacturing communities for improving their bargaining power, collaborating efficiently and analyzing the manufacturing service industry from a macro view. The core product manufacturers negotiate to select proper enterprises from different horizontal manufacturing communities to form an e-production chain where all the enterprises collaborate to complete the product manufacturing tasks with higher efficiency and minor cost. Moreover, the topological and physical characteristics of social manufacturing-oriented enterprise relationship network are discussed to analyze the enterprise collaborations from a micro view. Finally, an exemplary case is studied to verify the proposed model. It is expected that our work would be beneficial to the research of enterprise organizing and socialized manufacturing resources configuration under social manufacturing environment.