Ubiquitous manufacturing: overview, framework and further research directions

Abstract

The aim of this article is to develop a conceptual framework for successful implementation of ubiquitous manufacturing (UM). An interpretivist philosophy has been adopted, guided by deductive and inductive approaches, to develop a conceptual framework for successful implementation of UM. An attempt is made in this article to provide an overview of the available UM literature by developing and classifying a contextual relationship among identified variables using an interpretive structural modelling (ISM) technique, and further categorising these variables into four categories, depending upon their dependence and driving power, using cross-impact matrix multiplication (MICMAC) analysis. The synthesis of an ISM model and MICMAC analysis has resulted in a conceptual framework for successful implementation of UM. Finally, this article concludes with a summary of our findings and further research directions.

Keywords:

• ubiquitous manufacturing
• ubiquitous computing
• interpretive structural modelling; MICMAC

Acknowledgement

The authors are most grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments which helped to improve the presentation of the article considerably.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.