Planning and scheduling shared manufacturing systems: key characteristics, current developments and future trends

The economic and social crises of the past two decades have prompted a shift from traditional, isolated manufacturing to shared manufacturing. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend, with more enterprises adopting the shared manufacturing (ShardMfg) approach. This technique aims to reduce risks and to strengthen the resilience of manufacturing supply chains. The SharedMfg paradigm is a service-oriented manufacturing system that delivers collaborative production capacities on demand, relying on three pillars: Technology, Society, and Economy. SharedMfg involves extensively sharing manufacturing capacities through peer-to-peer cooperation, improving resource utilisation, reducing costs through economies of scale, supporting SMEs, and making the industry more competitive. While cloud software platforms are used for auctioning manufacturing capacities, there is ambiguity about the concept, confusion over terminology, and a lack of clear understanding of its potential and challenges regarding its implementation. Efficient planning and scheduling of shared manufacturing resources in a holistic way is a significant gap in these platforms. This paper aims to conduct an in-depth investigation, including a comparative analysis of different service-oriented production systems and terminology, while emphasising the critical importance of the shared factory business model using a systematic literature review method (SLR).