Networked Manufacturing and Mass Customization in the ECommerce Era: the Chinese Perspective

Recent rapid developments in computer and network technologies have profoundly influenced manufacturing research and practice as well as human society. Opportunities have been provided for conventional manufacturing companies to transform themselves with emerging patterns in order to meet quickly expanding demands of global customers. Networked manufacturing and mass customization (MC) highlight two important milestones in the development of computer integrated manufacturing. They have been making profound contributions to the society, economy, technology and science. Networked manufacturing is a new manufacturing pattern that can help enterprises improve their business management and enhance their competitiveness in the market. Since networked manufacturing covers the whole product lifecycle, it enables the circulation and integration of information and knowledge from product design to manufacturing and enables resource sharing among geographically distributed enterprises, thus equipping enterprises to respond to the market quickly. MC is a production pattern integrating enterprises, customers, and suppliers. It enables the efficient delivery of customized products or services with the virtues of low cost, high quality, and high efficiency. Under the direction of system theory and global optimization, MC supports various technologies such as standardization technology, modern design methodology, information technology, and advanced manufacturing technology. This special issue is dedicated to the area of Networked Manufacturing and Mass Customization. An emphasis is placed upon the E-Commerce and E-Business technologies. The focus is on reporting the recent Chinese developments in the Internet technologies to enhance the manufacturing research and practice. Most papers have been selected from outputs resulting from national projects including National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and 863 CIMS HiTech programme respectively. This special issue takes a snapshot of the progress and challenges achieved and encountered in the Chinese context. The rest of this extended editorial is organized as follows. Section 2 gives literature reviews of networked manufacturing and MC. Section 3 investigates the key technologies that are important and common in networked manufacturing and mass customization. Section 4 introduces the papers in this special issue and describes the research status in China. Section 5 points out future research directions in this field. Finally, a summary is presented in section 6.