Customer Co-Creation in Smart Production Ecosystems - Opportunities and Challenges for MDE

The traditional role of customers as passive consumers is gradually changing and consumers are actively participating in co-creation of the products they buy. This shift in paradigm has implications on how products should be modeled and the tools around Model-driven Engineering (MDE) must consider new ways of dealing with open-innovation, thereby preserving the privacy and intellectual property rights of the product sellers. In this paper, we discuss how MDE can help in setting up a smart production ecosystem, enabling the interaction between product sellers and consumers and identify some challenges in this context. Some new research directions for MDE are outlined.