A Living Lab Platform for Testing Additive Manufacturing Agent-Based Manufacturing Strategies

Distributed manufacturing systems are seeing increased investment by manufacturers looking for a more responsive, robust, and sustainable means to meet product demand amid market fragility, mass-customisation, sustainability, supply chain uncertainty, national security, Net Zero and the Circular Economy. One such system is Additive Manufacturing farms where numerous machines are housed in warehouses across the globe. The realisation of these systems in industry is offering the opportunity to exploit research in agent-based manufacturing strategies for the brokering and coordination of jobs. Until now, much of the underpinning research has been numerical and validation via empirical study is required to provide confidence in deploying the strategies in an industrial setting. To provide this validation, this paper presents an Opensource Living Lab platform that can be used to evaluate agent-based manufacturing strategies.