Development of a system architecture enabling a dynamic generation of process chains for Production as a Service

The manufacturing industry must cope with an increasing demand of personalized products. Combined with the necessity of sustainability becoming evident, local manufacturing and an a decentralized approach to manufacturing promises a solution to these problems. The concept of "Production as a Service" (PaaS) focuses on small lot sizes and personalized products and thus can resolve looking for manufacturers, linking the demand and the issue of underutilized equipment of manufacturers and product designers supply side. In this paper a system architecture is developed which enables the dynamic generation of alternative process chains in the context of PaaS using the C4 Model notation for visualization. The system architecture is based on a service-oriented architecture (SoA). The core of the architecture is building upon the Product, Process and Resource Model used to describe the manufacturing capabilities optimized to meet customer and market requirements. The development is based on the existing work on Production as a Service and the generation of alternative process chains outlined in the state of the art. Future research should be a detailed description of the process of matching products and resources. Additionally, a prototypical implementation is needed to evaluate the application of the system architecture in an industrial environment.