Smart manufacturing in intelligent digital mesh: Integration of enterprise architecture and software product line engineering

•Smart Manufacturing in Intelligent Digital Mesh (IDM) is complicated and inherits various sources of problems.•Addressing variability and complexity while allowing mass customization is highly important.•A comprehensive, integrated, customer-focused, and context-focused framework is needed.•IDM, Enterprise Architecture and Software Product Line Engineering are combined to create a Smart Manufacturing Development Framework.•A two-phased mixed research approach is adopted while the guidelines of Design Science Research Method are followed. Smart Manufacturing (SM) has substantial challenges, such as sharing data and integrating different systems or products into an intelligent, digital and interconnected manufacturing context. This situation naturally points to a contemporary paradigm, Intelligent Digital Mesh (IDM). Recent studies have presented the top ten state of the art technology trends called IDM, and they report forecasts about the technical developments for the future. However, the development of smart systems has been challenging, both for IDM and SM. Additionally, various sources of variability and complexities are inherent in these environments. One of them is the application of the development for SM. Except for the limited techniques; the review of literature cannot provide a comprehensive framework, which provides the integration of platform-, system- and enterprise-specific reusable solutions, while addressing the problems of mass customization and variability. Therefore, we conduct a two-phase mixed research, following the guidelines of the Design Science Research Method. The IDM, Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) approaches are combined to produce a Smart Manufacturing Development Framework (SMDF). This study can be viewed as an attempt to enhance SM and information integration knowledge domains.