Autonomy in Collaborative Manufacturing Networks

A collaborative manufacturing network is an alliance of business entities (mostly manufacturers and suppliers) who collaborate on the production of complex products. An essential element of this type of collaboration is that the participating entities are allowed to retain some measure of autonomy. In this paper we examine different approaches to collaborative manufacturing that support different levels of cooperation and autonomy. We identify three major architectures for collaborative manufacturing networks, and we describe a design for a single platform that supports all three architectures. The platform is based on three major components: an information repository, a service repository and a workflow repository. We also address several challenging issues, such as collaboration failures, management of supply capacities and order quantities, and risk estimation.