SUMMARY

The open business model has been attracting increasing attention from academia and manufacturing practitioners. It opens up the traditional boundary and invites the external partners in the physical product design and manufacturing processes. Such trends decentralized the product fulfillment process to achieve the offering of the opportunities for the small and medium enterprises and providing a higher variety of products to fulfill highly customized customer needs. However, there is a lack of a formulated product fulfillment model through the open design and manufacturing, and a dynamics model of the adoption of the open strategy. The topic of this thesis is identified as collaborative-crowdsourcing product fulfillment in open design and manufacturing. It proposes a new product fulfillment model to handle the decentralization of the product fulfillment process. The research problem is formulated as providing a systematic approach which allows the manufacturing practitioners to implement the open design and manufacturing for the physical products fulfillment with sustainable success.
The proposed work is geared towards the instantiation of the open design and manufacturing, besides, using a highly customized dental braces fulfillment process as a demonstration. This thesis reveals a stream of fundamental issues underlying the open design and manufacturing. Accordingly, a framework of logic and computational models are developed to support 1) group decision-making in the product fulfillment processes, 2) population dynamics analysis of the external partners, and 3) collaboration-negotiation contracting mechanism.