Implementing Manufacturing as a Service: A Pull-Driven Agent-Based Manufacturing Grid

Abstract

User requirements and low-cost small quantity production are new challenges for the modern manufacturing industry. This means that small batch sizes or even the manufacturing of one single product should be affordable. To make such a system cost-effective it should be capable to use the available production resources for many different products in parallel. This paper gives a description of the requirements and architecture of an end-user driven production system. The end-user communicates with the production system by a web interface, so this manufacturing system can be characterized in terms of cloud computing as the implementation of manufacturing as a service, abbreviated to MaaS.