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Top2. Networked Manufacturing Environments
A networked manufacturing environment (NME) (or a multi-site production network, MSPN) can be defined as a set of geographically dispersed facilities that process products, and are connected through a network (Arrais-Castro et al., 2012). This network aims to integrate the several processes and stages involved in the production cycle, with people participating on each one of them (concept definition, design, prototyping, development, manufacturing, identification and selection of markets, sales, support and other services, including reverse-engineering and reengineering (Cunha and Putnik, 2002a,b; Cunha et al., 2000; Cunha et al., 2005).
Business partners can vary from institutional partners to suppliers and customers, which also play a very important role in achieving the organization's objectives. Thus, it is also important to consider them in the network. For this reason the selection of potential business partners has become a major concern in distributed manufacturing networks implementation. This importance is even greater in the context of the current market characterized by a high level of globalization.
Moreover, NMEs can be viewed as complex manufacturing environments, where complexity may arise due to the geographical distribution of the manufacturing resources and/or their autonomy, besides the underlying complexity itself.