Evaluation across and within collaborative manufacturing networks: a comparison of manufacturers’ interactions and attributes

Evaluation on collaborative manufacturing network (CMN) structure characteristics has important implications for network operations such as production decision-making, product recovery, creating consensus. Several recent studies suggest that augmenting network structure with nodes’ attributes can provide a more fine-grained understanding of the network. However, there have been few studies to provide a systematic understanding of these effects in a CMN at scale. This gap is bridged using an industrial printing machinery CMN data-set collected on a web-based producing and outsourcing service platform. Novel phenomena with respect to both interaction and attribute metrics across and within the CMNs are observed. Moreover, although many studies employ either interaction or attribute data to study the relative roles of manufacturers in a CMN, relatively little is known about the relationship between these two types of data. This study explores this relationship by comparing two defined metrics (i.e. relational capability and node capability), which evaluate the manufacturers’ interactions and attributes, respectively. We examine to what extent the two metrics of manufacturers correlate with each other, and how possible dissimilarities and similarities can be explained based on the collected industrial CMN data-set. The insights thereby provide a better basis for efficient operations decision-making in CMN.