PLATFORM-DRIVEN CROWDSOURCED MANUFACTURING FOR MANUFACTURING AS A SERVICE

Platform-driven crowdsourced manufacturing is an emerging manufacturing paradigm to instantiate the adoption of the open business model in the context of achieving Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS). It has attracted attention from both industries and academia as a powerful way of searching for manufacturing solutions extensively in a smart manufacturing era. In this regard, this work examines the origination and evolution of the open business model and highlights the trends towards platform-driven crowdsourced manufacturing as a solution for MaaS. Platform-driven crowdsourced manufacturing has a full function of value capturing, creation, and delivery approach, which is fulfilled by the cooperation among manufacturers, open innovators, and platforms. The platform-driven crowdsourced manufacturing workflow is proposed to organize these three decision agents by specifying the domains and interactions, following a functional, behavioral, and structural mapping model. A MaaS reference model is proposed to outline the critical functions and inter-relationships. A series of quantitative, qualitative, and computational solutions are developed for fulfilling the outlined functions. The case studies demonstrate the proposed methodologies and can pace the way towards a service-oriented product fulfillment process. This dissertation initially proposes a manufacturing theory and decision models by integrating manufacturer crowds through a cyber platform. This dissertation reveals the elementary conceptual framework based on stakeholder analysis, including dichotomy analysis of industrial applicability, decision agent identification, workflow, and holistic framework of platform-driven crowdsourced manufacturing. Three stakeholders require three essential service fields, and their cooperation requires an information service system as a kernel. These essential functions include contracting evaluation services for open innovators, manufacturers' task execution services, and platforms' management services. This research tackles these research challenges to provide a technology implementation roadmap and transition guidebook for industries towards crowdsourcing.Ph.D

ICT Update 69: Engaging with communities through crowdsourcing

ICT Update is a bimonthly printed and on-line magazine (http://ictupdate.cta.int) and an accompanying e-mail newsletter published by CTA. This issue focuses on crowd sourcing

Enhancing shopping experiences in smart retailing

The retailing market has undergone a paradigm-shift in the last decades, departing from its traditional form of shopping in brick-and-mortar stores towards online shopping and the establishment of shopping malls. As a result, “small” independent retailers operating in urban environments have suffered a substantial reduction of their turnover. This situation could be presumably reversed if retailers were to establish business “alliances” targeting economies of scale and engage themselves in providing innovative digital services. The SMARTBUY ecosystem realizes the concept of a “distributed shopping mall”, which allows retailers to join forces and unite in a large commercial coalition that generates added value for both retailers and customers. Along this line, the SMARTBUY ecosystem offers several novel features: (i) inventory management of centralized products and services, (ii) geo-located marketing of products and services, (iii) location-based search for products offered by neighboring retailers, and (iv) personalized recommendations for purchasing products derived by an innovative recommendation system. SMARTBUY materializes a blended retailing paradigm which combines the benefits of online shopping with the attractiveness of traditional shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. This article provides an overview of the main architectural components and functional aspects of the SMARTBUY ecosystem. Then, it reports the main findings derived from a 12 months-long pilot execution of SMARTBUY across four European cities and discusses the key technology acceptance factors when deploying alike business alliances

The scope for pavement porters: addressing the challenges of last-mile parcel delivery in London

The UK parcel sector generated almost £9 billion in revenue in 2015, with growth expected to increase by 15.6% in 2019 and is characterized by many independent players competing in an ‘everyone-delivers-everywhere’ culture leading to much replication of vehicle activity. With road space in urban centers being increasingly reallocated to pavement widening, bus and cycle lanes, there is growing interest in alternative solutions to the last-mile delivery problem. We make three contributions in this paper: firstly, through empirical analysis using carrier operational datasets, we quantify the characteristics of last-mile parcel operations and demonstrate the reliance placed on walking which can make up over 60% of the round time; secondly we introduce the concept of ‘portering’ where vans rendezvous with porters who operate within specific ‘patches’ to service consignees on-foot, potentially saving 86% in driving distance on some rounds; finally, we highlight the wider practical issues and optimization challenges associated with operating driving and portering rounds in inner urban areas

Open Platform Concept for Blockchain- Enabled Crowdsourcing of Technology Development and Supply Chains

We outline the concept of an open technology platform which builds upon a publicly accessible library of fluidic designs, manufacturing processes and experimental characterisation, as well as virtualisation by a ‘digital twin” based on modelling, simulation and cloud computing. Backed by the rapidly emerging Web3 technology “Blockchain”, we significantly extend traditional approaches to effectively incentivise broader participation by an interdisciplinary ‘value network’ of diverse players. Ranging from skilled individuals (the ‘citizen scientist’, the ‘garage entrepreneur’) and more established research institutions to companies with their infrastructures, equipment and services, the novel platform approach enables all stakeholders to jointly contribute to value creation along more decentralised supply chain designs including research and technology development (RTD). Blockchain-enabled “Wisdom of the Crowds” and “Skin in the game” mechanisms secure “trust” and transparency between participants. Prediction markets are created for guiding decision making, planning and allocation of funding; competitive parallelisation of work and its validation from independent participants substantially enhances quality, credibility and speed of project outcomes in the real world along the entire path from RTD, fabrication and testing to eventual commercialisation. This novel, Blockchain-backed open platform concept can be led by a corporation, academic entity, a loosely organised group, or even “chieflessly” within a smart-contract encoded Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO). The proposed strategy is particularly attractive for highly interdisciplinary fields like Lab-on-a- Chip systems in the context of manifold applications in the Life Sciences. As an exemplar, we outline the centrifugal microfluidic “Lab-on-a-Disc” technology. Rather than engaging in all sub-disciplines themselves, many smaller, highly innovative actors can focus on strengthening the product component distinguishing their unique selling point (USP), e.g., a particular bioassay, detection scheme or application scenario. In this effort, system integrators access underlying commons like fluidic design, manufacture, instrumentation and software from a more resilient and diversified supply chain, e.g., based on a verified pool of community-endorsed or certified providers