Shared factory: A new production node for social manufacturing in the context of sharing economy

Abstract

Manufacturing industry is heading towards socialization, interconnection and platformization. Motivated by the infiltration of sharing economy usage in manufacturing, this article addresses a new factory model – shared factory, and provides a theoretical architecture and some actual cases for manufacturing sharing. Concepts related to three kinds of shared factories which deal, respectively, with sharing production-orders, manufacturing-resources and manufacturing-capabilities are defined accordingly. These three kinds of shared factory modes can be used for building correspondent sharing manufacturing ecosystems. On the basis of sharing economic analysis, we identify feasible key-enabled technologies for configuring and running a shared factory. At the same time, opportunities and challenges of enabling the shared factory are also analysed in detail. In fact, shared factory, as a new production node, enhances the sharing nature of social manufacturing paradigm, fits the needs of light assets and gives us a new chance to use socialized manufacturing resources. It can be drawn that implementing a shared factory would reach a ‘win-win’ way through production value-added transformation and social innovation.