A Bibliometric and Systematic Review of Manufacturing-as-a-Service: Literature Insights, Challenges, and Future Trends

Manufacturing-as-a-service consists of an Industry 4.0 innovation and has been a focal point of research and business attention in recent years. MaaS provides a matching connection between manufacturing resources or capabilities as service and organizations that need to utilize them, via a digital thread. Through this approach, not all companies have to invest in heavy capital, which allows them to focus on other critical capacities. This review provides bibliometric insights, such as quantitative results regarding the annual trends, dominant publications, journals, institutions, and VOS-viewer-software-extracted networks that highlight co-occurrence of keywords and journal co-citations. Moreover, the publications are presented concisely and are critically evaluated and categorized in pilar categories based on their core concept. The current limitations and future trends in the MaaS field are identified as well. Even though it is an established, important Industry 4.0 innovation, the available literature may not provide such a holistic, comprehensive overview of MaaS. The current study not only presents critical observations of contemporary and distinguished scientific papers but also guides researchers in a systematic examination of MaaS theoretically, architecturally represented, or regarding its data-driven opportunities.