A Marketplace for Smart Production Ecosystems: Managing Variability of Products and Factories

The need for product variability to satisfy the needs of customers means that the process of manufacturing these products must also expose a similar degree of flexibility. In this sense, production facilities (factories) can be seen as product lines of manufacturing services. The focus of this paper is on modeling variability of the products in association with the variability in production requirements – the interplay of which gives birth to a smart production ecosystem. We describe an open marketplace, where product sellers can offer their products with variability, end customers can configure these for their needs, and factories can offer their services to manufacture these customized products. Typically, the equipment used to build up the factory also offers variability; therefore the ecosystem also encompasses equipment vendors and the variability of this equipment. We attempt to bring together stakeholders of a production ecosystem in a marketplace that exploits product line engineering techniques.