A B2B Team Formation Microservice for Collaborative Manufacturing in Industry 4.0

Abstract

Manufacturing in supply chains commonly involves collaboration between multiple and diverse enterprises forming temporary coalitions. The matchmaking and assembly of multiorganizational resources to respond to a business opportunity is a key stage in production and supply chain management, particularly in the selection of suppliers taking into account enterprises of different sizes, capabilities and marketplace reputations. Industry 4.0 technologies can have a positive impact on collaborative manufacturing by digitalizing the team formation stage, speeding-up the collaboration process, minimizing supplier risk and maximizing coalition potential. This paper proposes a microservice for team formation to facilitate collaborative manufacturing in the context of Industry 4.0, guided by Design Science research practices and involving stakeholders' vision from the automotive and aviation industries. From a technical perspective, the microservice design is conceived to facilitate interoperability with Business-to-Business (B2B) platforms.

An approach and decision support tool for forming Industry 4.0 supply chain collaborations

“…The proposed approach and decision support tool applied to the formation of collaborative supply chain networks increases the likelihood of complex production requirements specified as digital CfTs to be fulfilled by a wider pool of enterprises joining capacities/capabilities and forming temporal supply chain collaborations [66,67]. This also facilitates SME integration into the manufacturing supplier pool, allowing SMEs to bid for large-scale business opportunities involving dynamic and complex tasks as part of a collaborative supply network, with benefits to supply chain and B2B market efficiency [68].…”

Collaborative Design and Manufacture: Information Structures for Team Formation and Coordination

“…The current research context has enlarged to include Industry 4.0 initiatives in aerospace and related industries. DIGICOR (https://www.digicor-project.eu/) is developing a collaboration platform, tools, and services to facilitate the set up and coordination of a production network; these are informed by case specific governance tools and procedures for collaboration, knowledge protection, and security [2]. The platform aims to provide seamless connectivity to existing automation solutions, smart objects, and real-time data sources across the network; this will enable manufacturing companies and service providers to create and operate collaborative networks across the value chain.…”

Digital Services for Industry 4.0: Assessing Collaborative Technology Readiness

“…Figure 3 presents the other seven similar categories identified as applications of collaborative technologies. 6 Production planning service is used to plan products, materials and resources [23] 7 Matchmaking is a service that provides suggestions of best potential partners for a given business opportunity [24] 8 Team creation is a kind of temporary alliance that is developed for short-term to share skills or core competencies and resources in order to better respond to business opportunities [24], [25] 9 These are customers' requirement analysis that can be in the form of tracing individual customer order specification from the shop floor and monitoring their order execution and may involve forecasting item delivery and evaluating customer satisfaction [26] 10 Risk evaluation is a process to compare the estimated risk against the given risk criteria [27] 11 Tender-decomposition is a business opportunity that supports tenders breakdown into sub-tenders [28] In the similarities identified, in comparison to the taxonomy we present in Figure 1, we found decision support, organisation environment and workflow management under applications category. Similarly, the bulletin boards, whiteboard, electronic newsgroups, project management, contact management and electronic workspace categories are recognised in the third classification structure [22] (see Figure 3).…”