Building Optimal Consortia in Smart Production Ecosystems

One of the key components of a smart production ecosystem is a marketplace that brings the different stakeholders involved in manufacturing product lines with variability requirements together. It is often not possible for a single factory to take on a production order to fully fulfill these requirements: multiple factories need to be involved and must work together as a consortium. In practice, setting up such consortia can be a lengthy process with several strategic, legal and organizational aspects to consider, which hinders short-term single-contract collaborations. This paper aims to present an approach for building a consortium in a marketplace environment by means of short-term contracts to quickly accept multi-factory manufacturing orders. In this setting, factory operators provide offers to fulfill one or more manufacturing steps involved in a published production tender. We propose a novel approach to achieve consensus between the participants regarding the contractual obligations, which results in an optimal smart contract between the consortium participants. The optimal consortium is selected based on a predefined objective function, like minimizing the overall production costs, minimizing the number or partners, $$\textrm{CO}:2$$ footprints, energy consumption or transportation efforts. The preference of all participating factories is considered.