The manufacturing blueprint environment: Bringing intelligence into manufacturing

Manufacturers today are rapidly moving into a business climate that is characterized by the ability to fulfill orders on demand by doing business through short-term networks where they negotiate value-adding processes dynamically – taking into account quality, time, price, viability, sustainability, and other dimensions. This necessitates the use of novel technologies to help manufacturers connect their data, processes, systems, personnel and equipment to enable smart factories. This paper proposes a new manufacturing paradigm, called manufacturing blueprints, which allows manufacturers to move from a traditional product-centric business model to a fully digital, knowledge-based and service-centric one. Using this paradigm, manufacturers are able to combine manufacturing and equipment data and knowledge, production systems and processes to form a smart manufacturing network to diversify products and build new markets.