Shared factory: a new production node for social manufacturing in the context of sharing economy

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of shared factories as a new social manufacturing node, integrating sharing economy principles into manufacturing through theoretical frameworks and case studies to enable resource sharing and ecosystem development.

Contribution

It proposes a novel shared factory model with three types of sharing modes, providing a theoretical architecture and analyzing key enabling technologies and challenges.

Findings

Identifies three shared factory modes for different sharing needs.

Highlights feasible technologies for configuring shared factories.

Discusses opportunities and challenges in implementing shared factories.

Abstract

Manufacturing industry is heading towards socialization, interconnection, and platformization. Motivated by the infiltration of sharing economy usage in manufacturing, this paper addresses a new factory model -- shared factory -- and provides a theoretical architecture and some actual cases for manufacturing sharing. Concepts related to three kinds of shared factories which deal respectively with sharing production-orders, manufacturing-resources and manufacturing-capabilities, are defined accordingly. These three kinds of shared factory modes can be used for building correspondent sharing manufacturing ecosystems. On the basis of sharing economic analysis, we identify feasible key enabled technologies for configuring and running a shared factory. At the same time, opportunities and challenges of enabling the shared factory are also analyzed in detail. In fact, shared factory, as a new production node, enhances the sharing nature of social manufacturing paradigm, fits the needs of light assets and gives us a new chance to use socialized manufacturing resources. It can be drawn that implementing a shared factory would reach a win-win way through production value-added transformation and social innovation.