Crowdsourced Manufacturing for Delivery of Manufacturing as a Service

The crowdsourcing environment engages a large population of crowds through a cyber platform on a sharing understanding of delivering manufacturing as a service (MaaS). Crowdsourced manufacturing is envisioned to be a future manufacturing paradigm for fulfilling MaaS tasks. This paper sketches a holistic approach to the symbiosis of crowdsourcing cyber platform technologies to serve intelligent decision support to manufacturing planning for achieving MaaS operational goals. It outlines a technical framework of platform-driven MaaS from a model-based systems engineering perspective. Crowdsourced manufacturing promises to exploit the implicit design and manufacturing knowledge incorporated in the library of previously executed manufacturing tasks, which facilitates the manufacturing process plans generation by parametric adjustment of process plans for similar tasks. Key technical challenges and potential research issues are addressed, along with a case study of crowdsourced orthodontics with 3D printing.