Social-level Macro-governed Collaborative Manufacturing Processes

Abstract

This paper proposes the social-level macro-governance mode for innovating the popular centralized control for CoM (Collaborative Manufacturing) processes, and makes this mode depend on the support from three aspects of technologies standalone and complementary: social–level CoM process norms, CoM process supervision system, and rational agents as the brokers of enterprises. It is the close coupling of those technologies that not only redounds to removing effectively the uncontrollability obstacle confronted with by cross-management-domain CoM processes, but also enables CoM applications to be implemented by uniting the centralized control of CoM partners for respective CoM activities, and therefore provides a new destributed CoM process control mode to push forward the convenient development and large-scale deployment of SME-oriented CoM applications.