A Distributed Manufacturing System

Abstract

From the mass production era, manufacturing systems began to be highly centralized for production efficiency, cost savings, and easy management. This approach is effective and significantly reduces the product cost, making products more accessible to the public. However, it has numerous drawbacks, such as a lack of design flexibility, limited customization, risk of overproduction, and high initial investment. Therefore, a more robust and decentralized manufacturing system is needed to improve efficiency, facilitate small game players’ participation and mobilize idle and less competitive resources. To achieve this, a distributed manufacturing system that can coordinate them and enable communication between them and the customer. Moreover, to ensure quality, numerous standards need to be established, such as a model-based manufacturing protocol and standardized quality inspection methods. In this work, a plan is being proposed on how to achieve such an ambition. This plan first designs the functionality of the system then identifies all the system's key components and specifies them with stages from minimal to vision. The system requirements and preliminary approaches of the initial version are documented. Following that, to better introduce the functionality of the system, a customer story is being made from both customer and supplier perspectives.