Building a Dataspace for Manufacturing as a Service in Factory-X
This addresses operational efficiency and quality issues for SME manufacturers using digital platforms, but it is incremental as it builds on existing automation concepts.
The paper tackles the challenge of automating interactions between small and medium-sized enterprise manufacturers and Manufacturing-as-a-Service platforms to handle increased requests efficiently and maintain high production quality for low lot sizes, presenting an architecture and prototype with evaluation.
One way to solve the challenge of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) manufacturers of acquiring sufficient orders is by joining digital Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS) platforms for on-demand manufacturing. However, joining such platforms brings about new challenges such as efficient quoting handling in the face of potentially low success rates and the need for high production quality for low lot sizes. Automating the complete interaction between manufacturers and MaaS platforms, from registering the manufacturer and its capabilities to handling incoming requests and managing offers, orders, and production quality reporting, helps to overcome these challenges. Thus, the increased number of requests can be handled efficiently, and the production quality can be maintained at a high level even for low lot sizes. This paper presents an architecture for automating the interaction and functional building blocks between manufacturers and MaaS platforms, along with a prototype implementation and evaluation of its effectiveness in addressing the challenges SME manufacturers are faced with.