Design of Marketplaces for Smart Manufacturing Services

Abstract The future of manufacturing depends on the successful implementation of two terms: cyber-physical systems (CPS) and micro-services. CPS technologies are transforming the way manufacturing components interact, just as the Internet has transformed the interaction with information. A micro-service is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely-coupled, independent, and self-executable programs that can be composed to provide various capabilities of large, monolithic manufacturing applications such as ERP and MES. The transition to such a modular structure enables two important features. First, micro-services can be sourced on a pay-as-you-go fashion from a large, diverse, and growing number of independent providers, thus opening the manufacturing space to new players such as innovative and agile startups. Second, those micro-services can be viewed as building-blocks for creating on-demand, complex, custom processes that address the specific needs of users. Taken together, micro-services, the platforms on which they reside, and service vendors constitute a multi-platform marketplace. This article first provides an overview of new manufacturing paradigms enabled by CPS and micro-services. It then formalizes the multi-platform marketplaces for micro-services as multi-layer networks of collaborating-competing agents with different interests, policies, capabilities, and technologies. It finally formulates a research methodology for optimizing the policies and interactions through the theories of matching markets and multi-agent reinforcement learning.