7. Social Factory and Interconnections

The concept of social factory under the context of social manufacturing (SM) is presented in this chapter. Social factory can be considered as a production node which aims to finish either part machining or product assembling tasks. It collaborates with customers and suppliers in the inter-enterprise level, and allocates factory objects such as human operators, machines, workpieces, and information systems in the intra-enterprise level to collaboratively fulfill production orders. It reveals the configuration mechanism and runtime logic of SM from network nodes perspective, and provides a novel blueprint for factory building in the future. To realize the vision of social factory, a decentralized production control framework is proposed, the core concept of smart workpiece, extended cyber-physical-social node (ECPSN), system framework, and runtime logic are clarified, and the decentralized production control architecture of social factory, including node control model, functional modules of ECPSN, and production interactions and cooperation are presented. On this basis, the research challenges and opportunities are discussed. Finally, a social factory prototype is implemented to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed factory framework.