Catalyzing the Agility, Accessibility, and Predictability of the Manufacturing-Entrepreneurship Ecosystem through Design Environments and Markets for Virtual Things

Abstract

Proposed is a fundamentally new approach to manufacturing as a service based on a market of virtual things: parameterized products and services that can be searched, composed and optimized, while hiding the underlying complexity of product designs and manufacturing service networks. The approach includes (1) a mathematical framework, composition and decision guidance for virtual things; (2) bootstrapping the market with novel computational techniques and tools to reuse the distributed wealth of existing product and process designs by generalizing them into models of virtual things; and, (3) intelligent computational design tools for entrepreneurs. The goal is to catalyze the agility, accessibility and predictability of the manufacturingentrepreneurship ecosystem, transforming the Future of Manufacturing.