Framework and Key Enabling Technologies for Social ...

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Applied Mechanics and Materials Vol. 312 (2013) pp 498-501 © (2013) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland doi:10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.312.498

Framework and Key Enabling Technologies for Social Manufacturing Jiewu Leng1, a, Pingyu Jiang1,b, Fuqiang Zhang 1,c and Wei Cao 1,d 1

State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi 710049, China a

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], d [email protected]

Keywords: Social Manufacturing, Production outsourcing, Community, Transient Machining System

Abstract.The role of manufacturing has changed from a producer of products and services to one that integrates the whole industry value chain. In this situation, this paper proposed a new-type networked manufacturing mode which is called outsourcing-driven social manufacturing (od-SM) to solve complex manufacturing problems and perform large-scale collaborative manufacturing. First, the framework of od-SM is proposed. Then, some key enabling technologies such as modeling and community structure of outsourcing-driven social manufacturing network (od-SMN) and generation of outsourcing-driven transient machining system (od-TMS) are talked about in detail. Finally, the conclusions and future work are put forward. Introduction In recent years, the increasing globalization of manufacturing enterprises has created many opportunities for cross-enterprise collaboration. Among them is production outsourcing activity [1], which is paid much attention in both academic and industrial areas due to its advantages over conventional manufacturing paradigm. It provides a dynamic way for manufacturing enterprises to cooperate with their partners, including suppliers and customers. The cross-enterprise collaboration integrates the distributed enterprises into a productive service group, in which each enterprise plays a positive role in producing the products with lower cost, shorter lead time, higher quality and more excellent services. Meanwhile, with the exponential advance of Internet, the number of socialized manufacturing resource services published on the web is growing at a faster speed than ever before, leading to great challenges to the efficient and effective management of shared surplus manufacturing resource services. As manufacturing industry is gradually borderless, new model for manufacturing outsourcing through network to meet the impendent challenge in the increasingly competitive marketplace is of great emergency. On the other hand, the emergence of social Web platforms as a global force in the last several years has done a great deal to highlight their potential to fundamentally change the way we communicate and collaborate both at home and in business. Social computing, describing any type of computing applications in which software serves as an intermediary or a focus for a social relation [2], has become a focus across a number of information and communication technology fields. It has drawn much interest from not only researchers but also technologists, software and online game vendors, Web entrepreneurs and digital government practitioners, to name a few. By supporting social interaction and communication, social computing creates a brand new opportunity for manufacturing enterprises as well as public communities. Definition and Framework of od-SM In this circumstance, by introducing the idea of social computing into manufacturing, a new-type networked manufacturing model called outsourcing-driven social manufacturing (od-SM) is proposed in this paper. The idea of od-SM is to establish an artificial social model for enabling ubiquitous, on-demand access to a dynamic shared manufacturing network of configurable socialized manufacturing resources (e.g., manufacturing equipments and their capabilities, manufacturing All rights reserved. No part of contents of this paper may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of TTP, www.ttp.net. (ID: 115.154.191.4-01/03/13,02:11:07)

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software tools) through the synergetic combination of dissimilar enterprises with different core competencies, thereby forming an on-demand manufacturing service with the capability of monitoring and assessing the performance of their partners for a given outsourcing task to achieve overall optimization of social manufacturing resources configuration. An ideal state in social manufacturing can be predicted that if someone has a good product idea and enough money, all the production processes related to the product can be fulfilled through the social manufacturing system from machining to assembly, yet without investing in expensive manufacturing and assembly lines [3]. According to the above definition, a conceptional framework of outsourcing-driven social manufacturing (od-SM) is provided, as shown in Figure 1. It can be clearly seen that there are four steps for implementing the od-SM. To clarify the outsourcing mechanism among different enterprises in the outsourcing-driven social manufacturing network (od-SMN), four key enabling technologies is discussed as follows.

Fig. 1 The framework of outsourcing-driven social manufacturing Key Enabling Technologies In this section, four key enabling technologies are described in detail, that is, modeling of social manufacturing resources and outsourcing manufacturing tasks, partner selection and game model, modeling and community structure of od-SMN and generation of od-TMS. Modeling of socialized manufacturing resources and outsourcing manufacturing tasks, raditionally, the machining task is scheduled by production planning department of each enterprise. Nowadays, enterprise clusters demand that core enterprises organize a group of co-enterprises to produce products together. For instance, Boeing company outsources lots of parts of its commercial airliners to those who have greater skills in specialized areas. On the one hand, core enterprises must make a strategic decision to outsource which production activities and broadcast those tasks to the Internet. The delivery date, amount and other demonds of every task should be descriped based on ontology so as to make the organization of od-SM easier. On the other hand, co-enterprises pay more attention to show their manufacturing equipents and other resources. A universal socialized manufacturing resources(SMRs) model which is supposed to be able to describe the processing capacity, productivity and resources status should be built so that we can manage the SMRs more efficient. Partner selection and game model. The process of searching for the appropriate partners and the continuous performance assessment of enterprises for a certain type of outsourcing task is of great significance to the successful running of od-SM system. In this aspect, it is important to create a decision support level to enhance the overall performance of the system. In order to enhance the partner assessment capability by automating the decision making process during partner selection,

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game theory [4], a kind of mathematical analysis method for strategic interaction, is employed here to construct a partnership selection model. In 1960s, since the appearance of von Neumann and Morgenstern's classic Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, game theory has been widely applied to problems in economics and politics. It was expected that game theory we introduced here can help decision makers in making effective decisions about partners when forming an od-TMS among communities, or evaluating potential partners to outsource certain activities to gain a competitive advantage. It is important to note that special attention should be given to modeling problems in three facets: enterprise evaluation, bargaining and interactive mechanisms. Modeling and community structure of od-SMN. This key enabling technology takes the service outsourcing collaboration network as research object, and introduces the concept of community structure into the od-SMN. To investigate and exploit the od-SMN clustering behavior and other network characteristics among enterprises and SMRs, and provide the theoretical basis for intelligent decision-making in social manufacturing, complex network theory is supposed to be employed here. For instance, in order to extract and build od-SMN, enterprises together with their SMRs are abstracted as different network nodes; the actual or potential outsourcing relationships among different enterprise nodes are abstracted as the network edges; the collaboration probabilities derived from the analysis of collaborative and interactive behaviour in the process of outsourcing among different enterprise nodes via social computing and behavioral operations research are abstracted as the network weights. As a result, the topology model of od-SMN can be established and formatted as G = (V, E, G). After the construction of od-SMN, we can use complex network theory to analyze its characteristics. It should be pointed out that the established od-SMN is an undirected network derived from an adjacency matrix. Community is a sub-system of od-SM, which has central management functions of implementing decomposition, allocation, coordination, monitoring and outsourcing collaboration management for outsourcing tasks. Based on the comparison of the edge density among nodes, an intuitive definition from the network perspective is easily obtained: the communities are groups of nodes within which connections are denser, and between which connections are sparser. Given a critical value, an optimal community division solution could be achieved automatically and intelligently in od-SMN. Actually, a community comprises of a variety of enterprises and workshops with different capabilities and services such as designing, nontraditional machining, cutting tool management and logistic distribution to perform the whole life cycle activities and services of a kind or a series of product. Usually, one core enterprise plays a crucial role in coordinating the whole community. Generation of od-TMS. Outsourcing tasks related to machining processes and parts are becoming one of the most significant manufacturing service activities during the production procedure [5].It is necessary to have a tool to select potential enterprises and SMRs with the capability of monitoring and assessing the performance of their partners in od-SMN. So, the concept of outsourcing-driven transient machining system (od-TMS) is introduced here. The purpose is to provide a systematic solution for users to integrate the manufacturing with services so as to realize the added-value of production activities. An od-TMS performs outsourcing tasks related to machining processes and parts through the intelligent integration of SMRs, service matching and finding, service running and monitoring in a certain community, in which the enterprises have a better outsourcing relationship and creditworthiness to the service requestor. According to the discussion mentioned above, an ontology-based algorithm is introduced to generate od-TMS. As shown in Fig.2, the specific implementing procedure is correspondent with several steps such as description and release, retrieval and matching, selection and evaluation. Futhermore, as the core of algorithm, the retrieval and matching process includes:(1) decomposing the outsourcing task into sub-task at a manufacturing feature level through an ontology-based inference engine; (2) matching the most similar SMRs in the community to perfrom each sub-task based on inference engine. This step outputs the candidate SMRs sets; (3) adapting the ant colony optimization (ACO) to compose the SMRs whcih belong the corresponding sub-tasks under manufacturing constraints given by the service requestor. (4) generating and exporting the canlidate services for service requestor to be concerned.

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Fig. 2 Generation of outsourcing-driven Transient Machining System Conclusion The purpose of this article is to put forward an effective conceptual framework for the collaboration among different enterprises and the realization of overall optimization of social manufacturing resources configuration. After combining the concepts of outsourcing and social computing into one, we propose a new type of networked manufacturing model called outsourcing-driven social manufacturing (od-SM) to integrate the distributed SMRs and to provide on-demand services for service requestors among loosely connected manufacturing enterprises in different regions. The framework of od-SM is established. In order to make sure the social system runs successfully, four enabling key technologies are described in detail. The first one is to construct the model of social manufacturing resources and outsourcing manufacturing tasks. The second one is to use game theory for service requestor to choose right partners among different manufacturing or service enterprises.The third one is to establish a topology model of an outsourcing-driven social manufacturing network (od-SMN) and give a definition of od-SM community. The last one is to propose the idea of outsourcing-driven transient machining system (od-TMS) and develop an ontology-based algorithm so as to find the optimal od-TMS. Further research in this area will include modeling of SMRs and OMT, the mathematical model of partner selection, and developing an od-SM prototype system to illustrate the proposed methods. Acknowledgements The research work presented in this paper is under the support of National S&T Support Project in the 12th Five-Year Plan with grant number 2012BAH08F06. References [1] Mary Amiti, Shang-Jin Wei: Economic Policy Vol.20 (2005), p.308–347 [2] D. Schuler: Comm. ACM, vol. 37(1994), p. 28–29. [3] Wei Cao, and Pingyu Jiang: Applied Mechanics and Materials Vols. 220-223 (2012), p. 61-64 [4] Basar, Tamer ; Olster, Geert Jan: Dynamic noncooperative game theory (Burlington, MA: Elsevier, 1982). [5] T.T. Raa and E.N. Wolff: Journal of Productivity Analysis, Vol.16 (2001), p.149-165.

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Framework and Key Enabling Technologies for Social Manufacturing 10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.312.498