Shared Resources

The output of greenhouse gas emissions can be described as utilization of limited shared resources. Within the EU the consumption of environmental resources is covered by regulatory constraints. Resulting consequences lead to new strategic and operational challenges for the controlling. The new regulations have an impact on several company levels and will be discussed in the following.

Current developments of Industry 4.0 offer new possibilities for coordination and coope-ration in production networks. Information technology allows for an ad-hoc documentation and analysis of system states. Hence, manufacturing resources can be offered to other companies in the short term, and coordination, scheduling, and billing can be done quickly. Industry and science now need to find appropriate procedures and practices how to implement and run networks of shared resources.

Companies have to cope with an individualization of products. Consequently, they are confronted with an increasing cost pressure and thus, they require optimal manufacturing processes. A possible approach is to share manufacturing resources with other companies to maximize the utilization of these resources. This paper describes possible perspectives of resource sharing for companies by using an analogy between the Web 2.0-based Share Economy and resource sharing of tomorrow’s production based on Industry 4.0.