Trends towards Distributed Manufacturing Systems and Modern Forms for their Design

TLDR

Manufacturing paradigms must evolve to support highly individualized, on‑demand production with minimal delivery times, driving a shift toward geographically distributed, sustainable, customer‑proximate manufacturing networks. This paper identifies the drivers behind the shift to decentralized and distributed manufacturing systems. The authors review traditional and contemporary geographically distributed production models, outline emerging visionary directions, and analyze the spectrum from standardized factories to generative cloud‑production units.

Abstract

In the future, long-established paradigms of production will still have to continue to change in order to meet the demand for even more individuality, customer-specific product variants and shortest delivery times within the meaning of the term "production on demand". Therefore, in the future, the concept of the Distributed Manufacturing by geographically distributed production systems plays an increasingly important role. New and innovative ways of organizing production operations will be needed. Particularly due to the increasingly loud request for a sustainable and ecologically production and distribution decentralized manufacturing systems are an ideal approach, because the production takes place closer to the customer. It needs modern organizational models for small, flexible and scalable production units in decentralized production networks, which take into account the local and individual customer needs and produce as possible locally. This paper presents the drivers for the trend towards decentralized and distributed manufacturing systems. In addition, the paper gives a complete overview of traditional and modern forms of geographically distributed production and the prospect of new and partly visionary development directions. The paper examines the range of the concept of Distributed Manufacturing starting from standardized factories to visionary generative manufacturing units according the concept of Cloud-Production.