Industry Review of Distributed Production in Discrete Manufacturing

Distributed production paradigms have grown in discrete manufacturing as discrete products are increasingly made by global, distributed networks. Challenges faced by discrete manufacturing, such as increased globalization, market volatility, workforce shortages, and mass personalization have necessitated scalable solutions that improve the agility of production systems. These challenges have driven the need for better collaboration and coordination in production via improved integration of production systems across the product lifecycle. This paper describes key industry use cases to motivate the research and development needed for distributed production in discrete manufacturing. The technological challenges that have hindered distributed production in discrete manufacturing are presented as is a state-of-the-art review of the standards and technologies that have been developed to overcome these challenges. Based on this review, future research directions are described to address the needs of industry and achieve the goals of distributed production in discrete manufacturing.