A Digital Platform Architecture to Support Multi-dimensional Surplus Capacity Sharing

Abstract

The highly disruptive transformation that digital platforms are imposing on entire sectors of the economy, along with the broad digitalization of industrial business processes, is having an impact on supply chains around the world. To take advantage of this new aggregated market paradigm new business models with a heavy focus on servitization are changing the value proposition of businesses. In this paper, we describe a reference architectural framework designed to support a digital platform fostering the optimization of supply chains by the pairing of unused industrial capacity with production demand. This framework aims at harmonizing stakeholder requirements with specifications of different levels in order to set up a coherent reference blueprint that serves as a starting point for development activities. A four-layer approach is used to articulate between technical components, with the data and tools layers, and the ecosystem, with the business and interfaces layers. The overall architecture and component description is presented as extensions of the initial set of affordances.