Enabling production as a service

Researchers: Efe Balta, Leonard Lin

The objective of this research is to design a digital manufacturing framework with necessary abstraction mechanisms and ontologies to respond to the customer (consumers or product developers) demand and effectively connect the customers with customized small batch manufacturing needs with the geo-distributed manufacturers that have existing underutilized resources, while preserving the intellectual property of both the customers and the manufacturers.

We propose a Production as a Service (PaaS)  framework, which is a cloud-based, centralized framework based on the SOA design framework that assigns the manufacturing steps of a product as individual services. Using PaaS, the user is able to reach many candidate manufacturers with adequate capabilities at once, and receive quotations for the production request. On the other end, manufacturers can easily submit quotations for suitable jobs, which in turn increases the utilization of their resources, and reduces the effort to find new customers. Extensible APIs and optimization algorithms for the back-end and the front-end of the framework are designed and implemented for the research.

PaaS Framework flowchart
Conceptual design of Production as a Service framework. Click on the image for the implementation page.

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