Collaborative-crowdsourcing product fulfillment for open design and manufacturing

The open business model has attracted much attention from academia and industries alike. It implies many new opportunities for product innovatiopn to transend traditional boundaries and leaverage diverse capabilitied and resources by coherently integrating external partners into the design and manufacturing processes. Such trends lead to the decentralization of the product fulfillment process. Particularly, the open business model offers the opportunities for the small and medium enterprises to fulfill various customer needs in an innovative crowdsourcing manner. While open design and manufacturing sounds appealing, research on formal formulation of crowdsourcing product fulfillment has been very limited. The underlying challenge for adoption and reversion of the open business strategy is the difficulty in justify the population dynamics of crowdsourcing. This thesis puts forward collaborative-crowdsourcing product fulfillment (C2PF) for open design and manufacturing. This work proposes a new product fulfillment workflow to accommodate the decentralized yet collaborative product fulfillment process. The research focus is geared towards the instantiation of the open design and manufacturing with a highly individualized dental braces fulfillment process as a case study. The thesis investigates the fundamental issues underpinning open design and manufacturing. A game-theoretic decision framework is proposed to deal with such critical issues as (1) group decision-making in the product fulfillment processes, (2) dynamics analysis of the external partners’ population, and (3) collaboration-negotiation contracting scheme based on an information contents measure. Since the boundaries are opened to the external partners, the product fulfillment decision-making processes must be reengineered to adapt the collaborative-crowdsourcing process. The workflow of C2PF is established. The supply contracting mechanism is identified as the key pillars to support the product fulfillment flow. In addition, to model the population dynamics of the partners, an evolutionary competition-cooperation game theoretic model is established. The relationships among participation fraction of the partners, the balance of inter-domain capacity, and income and distribution have been established. It reveals a competition-cooperation relationship between the external partners and a co-evolutionary characteristic of the entire population. This model provides a guideline for the management of the open enterprise, with considering of the long-time prosperity. Moreover, to achieve the collaborative crowdsourcing, a generalized supply contracting evaluation mechanism has been proposed. This mechanism supports the collaborative-negotiation from the bidding perspective. The evaluation mechanism handles the uncertainty, aggregates multi-criteria evaluation results and ensures the satisfaction of the requirements. The proposed theory is applied to the open design and manufacturing, respectively. Furthermore, a case study of the dental brace product fulfillment process is reported to demonstrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed C2PF framework. The case study illustrates the roles of the stakeholders through C2PF and shows the steps of the execution of the proposed process. This case study serves as a validation of the proposed open physical product fulfillment methodology.M.S