Manufacturing Networks Design through Smart Decision Making towards Frugal Innovation

The ever-increasing complexity of the advanced manufacturing environments together with the global competition, dictate the investigation of new approaches for manufacturing networks design and configuration. In addition to that, the newcomer concept of frugal innovation is moving towards a new business model by adapting local market requirements and providing cost-efficient and high customer-value solutions. Towards that end, a methodology for manufacturing networks design via a smart search algorithm is proposed, targeting the adoption of frugal innovation in a new manufacturing network. The proposed methodology is validated using data from an industrial case study.