Building a Dataspace for Manufacturing as a Service in Factory-X

TL;DR

This paper proposes an architecture and prototype for automating interactions between SME manufacturers and Manufacturing-as-a-Service platforms to improve efficiency and quality in on-demand manufacturing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture and functional components for automating SME manufacturer interactions with MaaS platforms, validated through a prototype.

Findings

Automated interaction handling improves request processing efficiency.

High production quality is maintained for low lot sizes.

Prototype demonstrates effective automation in real-world scenarios.

Abstract

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.