A methodology toward manufacturing grid-based virtual enterprise operation platform

Abstract

Virtual enterprises (VEs) have become one of main types of organisations in the manufacturing sector through which the consortium companies organise their manufacturing activities. To be competitive, a VE relies on the complementary core competences among members through resource sharing and agile manufacturing capacity. Manufacturing grid (M-Grid) is a platform in which the production resources can be shared. In this article, an M-Grid-based VE operation platform (MGVEOP) is presented as it enables the sharing of production resources among geographically distributed enterprises. The performance management system of the MGVEOP is based on the balanced scorecard and has the capacity of self-learning. The study shows that a MGVEOP can make a semi-automated process possible for a VE, and the proposed MGVEOP is efficient and agile.

Keywords:

• manufacturing grid
• virtual enterprise
• performance management system
• balanced scorecard
• member selection
• manufacturing information systems
• enterprise information systems

Acknowledgement

This research was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60874120, the Aeronautical Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 20081952014, and the Shanghai Science Foundation under Baiyulan Research Project with Grant No.2009B049.