Crowdsourced Manufacturing Cyber Platform and Intelligent Cognitive Assistants for Delivery of Manufacturing as a Service: Review of Fundamental Issues and Outlook
Abstract Future cyber manufacturing is envisioned to be fulfilled in a crowdsourcing environment that will engage a large population of manufacturer crowds to collaborate with the cyber platform on a shared understanding of the tasks for delivering manufacturing as a service (MaaS). This review paper is motivated towards a symbiosis of crowdsourcing cyber platform technologies to enhance intelligent decision support to manufacturing planning for achieving MaaS operational goals. The paper reviews the fundamental issues of MaaS through crowdsourcing from a model-based systems engineering perspective that is in line with a systematic framework of platform-driven MaaS. Also discussed is the outlook of analytic and model-based approach for crowdsourced manufacturing in order to enable new cyber manufacturing capabilities that represent a significant transformation of the manufacturing sector. The vision is to facilitate transition from the current practice of focusing on automation and manufacturing informatics within individual enterprise to open manufacturing crowds throughout the cloud platform to fulfill MaaS. The cyber platform and intelligent cognitive assistants enhance MaaS fulfilment by adopting computational modeling and decision analytics to exploit the implicit design and manufacturing knowledge that is incorporated in the library of previously executed manufacturing tasks, which in turn facilitates generation of manufacturing process plans by parametric adjustment of process plans for similar tasks.