Distributed manufacturing

Distributed production means that both the development of digital product designs and the physical production are organised in a distributed or decentralised way. Production is distributed because globally distributed actors contribute to the digital product development, but the physical artefacts are produced locally as close as possible to the customer or place of need. For this, local capacities of digital manufacturing technologies, such as 3D printers and other CNC machines as corresponding physical infrastructure, are an essential prerequisite because they translate the digital product designs (CAD and CAM) into physical goods. Instead of mass producing products in other countries and sending these physical goods to the customer via global supply chains, manufacturing information (OSH blueprints, machine and material data) is sent to a node near the customer via a digital infrastructure, so that local manufacturing capacities can produce on demand instead.