Towards a wisdom manufacturing vision

Manufacturing enterprises are socio-technical systems, which necessitate overall integration of not only the technical aspects from devices in shop-floor to enterprise resources planning vertically and from product order to shipment horizontally, but also the social aspects such as human interactions and consumers’ intentions. Moreover, there is a growing need in the use of knowledge in enterprise contexts. To meet such needs, wisdom manufacturing (WM) is emerging with advances in the Internet and manufacturing as well as intelligence. In this paper, the most recently developed manufacturing models such as smart manufacturing (SM)/smart factory (SF), cloud manufacturing (CM) and socialised enterprise (SE)/Enterprise 2.0 are analysed, and a WM vision is presented to aggregate SM, CM, SE and existing intelligent manufacturing (IM) that are complementary to each other. Then pathways towards the WM vision are addressed in relationship to knowledge, intelligence, creativity/innovation, learning and wisdom, especially from DIKW (data-information-knowledge-wisdom) and semiotic perspectives as well as from the web evolution. And wisdom and realisation towards the WM vision are investigated. Finally, a case study is used to illustrate the WM vision landscape followed by a conclusion. As a consequence, things, computers and humans, ubiquitous, artificial and collective intelligence, as well as explicit and tacit knowledge, are integrated as a whole in the WM.