Proposal of a service data model for virtual manufacturing enterprises

The ever increasing pressure on costs, quality and time to market, the uncertain demand and the intense global competition have been the main drivers of the evolution of manufacturing enterprises in the last decades. As a result, many different forms of collaborative networks between organizations, such as Business Ecosystems and Virtual Manufacturing Enterprises, emerged in the last years. They enabled enterprises to complement their core competencies and gave pace to the notions of Servitization and Extended Products, i.e. diversification strategies that stems from the growing number of product-related services. Furthermore, the research streams regarding Servitization and Collaborative Networked Organizations are intertwined with the promises of PLM, aiming to leverage the data generated during the product lifecycle to create valuable knowledge and thus improve quality, efficiency and sustainability of the product and its related services. The MSEE project, funded by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme and still in progress, is addressing the themes described above to develop new competencies and processes, in order to support the overall service lifecycle in connection with the product's one. The present thesis contributes to these efforts by developing a Data Model which is able to manage the details of both the product and its related services. In particular, the Service Data Model is the result of the integration of USDL, a language that allows to formally describe business, operational and technical aspects of services, with the product-centric perspective of the Quantum Lifecycle Management standard. In addition, the thesis presents a model for managing the relationships between the actors of a Virtual Manufacturing Enterprise through the use of Service Level Agreements, that exploits the information collected by the Service Data Model in order to ensure the quality of the provided services. The proposed procedure requires that the specific objectives and the related metrics of a SLA are defined making reference to the VRM model, a hierarchical framework for measuring the performance of the processes taking place within an extended value chain. Lastly, the meaningfulness of the proposed models has been validated through realistic data collected in the two use cases with existing businesses.