Socialized Manufacturing Resources and Interconnections

Driven by the increasing product individualization and servitization in manufacturing industry, the massive demands of specialized manufacturing services promote more decentralized and socialized manufacturing resources (SMRs) to spring up. Many SMRs possessing the characteristics of decentralized, self-adaptive, and self-organization begin to cluster as community to provide specialized manufacturing services for prosumers. Based on the established connections via social media and decentralized platform, various communities of SMRs are formed as complex, dynamic autonomous systems to co-create mass individualized products and services. Since a disorganization of these decentralized SMRs will hinder the coordinative decision-making and result in an inferior position to prosumers when bargaining with the core manufacturer, it should be coordinated at better shaping of SMRs network. The concept, organizational and running shapes, management of SMRs are discussed. Further a social manufacturing resource network (SMRN) is presented to organize massive distributed SMRs. It addresses group intelligence in decision making so as to organize SMRs and prosumers in the whole stages of a product lifecycle.