With increasing product personalization and open innovation, the manufacturing paradigm has been transforming to a more decentralized and socialized one. Social manufacturing was proposed as a new paradigm for industry. It extends the crowdsourcing idea to the manufacturing area. By establishing cyber–physical–social connection via decentralized social media, various communities can be formed as complex, dynamic autonomous systems to co-create customized and personalized products and services. This article presents the concept and characteristics of social manufacturing including distributed, adaptive, and self-organization. It also addresses social intelligence in proactive decision-making for organization of socialized resources and producers in the life-cycle of product.

Since the introduction of the concept of cloud manufacturing in 2010, research on it has been ongoing for more than eight years, and much progress has been made. However, existing research indicates that people lack common and comprehensive understandings of some of the key issues with cloud manufacturing such as the concept, operation model, service mode, technology system, architecture, and essential characteristics. Moreover, few studies discuss in depth the relationships between cloud manufacturing and some closely related concepts such as cloud computing-based manufacturing, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), smart manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and Industrial Internet. Knowledge as a core supporting factor in cloud manufacturing has rarely been discussed systematically. Also, so far there has been no standardised definition for cloud manufacturing yet. All these are key issues to be further discussed and analysed in cloud manufacturing. In order to clarify the issues above and provide reference for future research and implementation, this paper conducts a comprehensive, systematic, and in-depth discussion and analysis of the aforementioned issues in cloud manufacturing and presents an alternative definition for cloud manufacturing based on the analysis of 12 existing definitions. Future perspectives of cloud manufacturing are also discussed with respect to both academic research and industrial implementation.

Manufacturing knowledge (MK) is enjoying a “new golden age” in the academic domain, marked by vast reuse to support product-related production problems (PPs) solving decision making for manufacturing enterprises in the industry sector. However, the practice of MK reuse and research is fragmented and insufficient, which cannot be mature to provide a systemic solution for that a decision-maker has to consider the involving issues: how MK can be used earlier and rightly; what kind of practical problems can be solved? In order to answer those interconnecting issues, this paper firstly proposes a connectivism framework to clarify the compressive relationship of problem-to-problem, knowledge-to-knowledge and problem-to-knowledge with knowledge integration, knowledge matching, and problem-solving layers. Then, based on the framework, an ontology-based MK graph (MKG) is constructed with a unified MK-filter to collect and integrate multifactor and multilevel MK, and a graph-oriented meta-knowledge model (MKM) is proposed to represent the details between the knowledge entities (i.e., concept and instance), which also shows the contribution to knowledge reasoning. After that, driven by a structure temporal query (i.e., 5W2H), a semantics-based knowledge computation is developed to compute the intrinsic term similarity (IS) and relational term similarity (RS) between two knowledge entities in the MKG. Finally, a case study is taken to demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed methods.