  Manufacturing industry is heading towards socialization, interconnection, and
platformization. Motivated by the infiltration of sharing economy usage in
manufacturing, this paper addresses a new factory model -- shared factory --
and provides a theoretical architecture and some actual cases for manufacturing
sharing. Concepts related to three kinds of shared factories which deal
respectively with sharing production-orders, manufacturing-resources and
manufacturing-capabilities, are defined accordingly. These three kinds of
shared factory modes can be used for building correspondent sharing
manufacturing ecosystems. On the basis of sharing economic analysis, we
identify feasible key enabled technologies for configuring and running a shared
factory. At the same time, opportunities and challenges of enabling the shared
factory are also analyzed in detail. In fact, shared factory, as a new
production node, enhances the sharing nature of social manufacturing paradigm,
fits the needs of light assets and gives us a new chance to use socialized
manufacturing resources. It can be drawn that implementing a shared factory
would reach a win-win way through production value-added transformation and
social innovation.
