Manufacturing as Service: the challenge of Intelligent Manufacturing

The evolution of manufacturing met what is apparently its antithesis: the service activities. Therefore, a mixed approach that put together classic discrete (product oriented) activities and services emerged as a paradigm shift from the traditional production line, which does not fit completely in the new concepts of service science. Such conceptual ambiguity is making the design of such systems a new challenge. In this paper we briefly analyze this new tendency and introduce a proposal for a new framework to service design based on Petri Nets, formalism normally used to discrete systems and workflow analysis. That is very suitable to produce good design with this hybrid (product and service) characteristic.