Service manufacturing: Basic concepts and technologies

Abstract

Abstract Manufacturing is undergoing transformation driven the developments in process technology, information technology, and data science. The incoming changes are disruptive and will likely result in manufacturing solutions unimaginable in the recent past. A future manufacturing corporation will be highly digital, and it will function in new modes discussed in this paper. After decades of integration of engineering design and manufacturing, the design-for-dedicated manufacturing will gradually transform in the design-for-open manufacturing. In many instances, manufacturing processes will become manufacturing-as-service (service manufacturing) systems. An enterprise will be gradually dominated by formation of services in a cloud. The emerging service manufacturing will be open, shared, easy to configurable, efficient, and democratic. Designing a manufacturing system of the past will reduce to formulating and solving an enterprise configuration problem. The presence of services in the cloud will be facilitated by the autonomously generated models. A formal modeling approach to configuration of manufacturing enterprises is discussed. The computational complexity of the configuration problem calls for different modeling and solution approaches ranging from mathematical programming and data science to quantum computing.