SUMMARY

Crowdsourced manufacturing is an emerging manufacturing paradigm to instantiate the adoption of the open business model in the context of manufacturing. 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 crowdsourced manufacturing. 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 crowdsourced manufacturing workflow is proposed to organize these three decision agents by specifying the domains and interactions. A series of mechanisms and software solutions are developed to support the handling of task flow from the product, platform, and manufacturing domain. Adopting the service-oriented paradigm, an Information-as-a-Service system is proposed to serve the product realization process. Crowdsourced manufacturing relies on the manufacturer crowds to enrich the manufacturing capabilities, which transform the centralized decision-making into a cohort one. An evolutionary competition-cooperation game model is developed to find a robust revision protocol to sustain a prosperous manufacturer population.