Production As A Service: Optimizing Utilization In Manufacturing Systems

While advances in technology have greatly improved the process of mass production, producing small batches or one-offs in an efficient manner has remained challenging for the manufacturing industry. Additionally, in both large and small companies, there are often available manufacturing resources that sit idle between projects. In this paper we present a Production as a Service framework for providing manufacturing options to designers of new products based on available manufacturing resources. The designed framework aims to bridge the gap between the theoretical work that has been done on Service Oriented Architectures in manufacturing, and what is required for implementation. An industrial use case is provided as an example of the framework.