Introduction

Abstract

The general perception of high performance information and communication technology and upcoming smart network devices in many areas of everyday life makes us expect more innovations to come that are directly relevant for manufacturing. The first implementations of cloud solutions and item localisation in manufacturing have provided striking evidence for the power of these devices, and the supposed potential behind is only touched. All these innovations and novelties have groundbreaking and disruptive effects and will therefore jeopardise established business models and even challenge well saturated manufacturing processes’ set ups. The static manufacturing system will definitely be replaced by the dynamic manufacturing network additionally represented by virtualisations of manufacturing units and their connections. Instead of costly suppressing the network nature of manufacturing processes, we may learn to exploit these network properties. Better structured and more formal models are needed for capturing all decisive network features, for guaranteeing software support and for promoting additional standards and tools that will be required for the management. In order to cope with the socio-technical-economical nature of manufacturing, the interdisciplinary base for methodical work has to be consolidated. The book aims at contributing to the addressed fields by proposing a theory framework that captures the new principles and tools that have been identified and established in exhaustive studies on networked manufacturing. Completely new rules of the game with a major shift in skills in the factories and on the shopfloors require more compact descriptions and better theory grounds for the new manufacturing principles that have stepped into the industrial context. For the coherent presentation of the matter, a section structure is motivated and selected audiences for the outline are named.