With the development of cloud manufacturing technology, Manufacturing Service Ecosystem (MSE) is emerging as a typical complex cyber-social system. On the one hand, service strategy (cyber layer) drives the evolution of manufacturing community (social layer); on the other hand, the initial conditions of manufacturing community (social layer) affect the performance of service strategy. In order to promote the evolution of MSE in the expected direction, it is necessary to clarify the loop feedback mechanism between heterogeneous networks. However, how to analyze and intervene in the possible evolution directions of MSE has become a serious challenge in the field. In order to face this challenge, this paper proposes a parallel system theory-based research framework to study the evolution and controlling of MSE. First, the corresponding digital system of MSE is constructed from the perspective of supply and demand matching. Second, the specific computational experiment is executed to present the effect of different service strategies (cyber layer) and different initial conditions (social layer) on the evolution of MSE. Furthermore, the comparison of experiment results with real data verifies the credibility of the proposed approach. It demonstrates that our approach can provide a new way for analyzing the complexity of MSE.

As a new form of manufacturing industry in the Internet era, social manufacturing has its inherent “social-cyber” complexity: the source of manufacturing service is social, and such sociality aggravates the diversity, uncertainty, and dynamics of service supply. This poses new challenges to the service matching between supply-side and demand-side. In order to meet this challenge, it is necessary to conduct a complexity analysis of social manufacturing. Traditional researches mainly rely on data statistics and macro analysis, in which there are difficulties in clearly identifying the links between various impact factors and macro evolution phenomena. In order to change such a situation, this paper proposes a modeling framework of social manufacturing from the aspect of social learning evolution (SLE), including individual evolution model, organizational learning model, and social learning model. Based on the SLE framework, the corresponding computational experiment system is built to analyze the complexity of social manufacturing. The performance of several evolution mechanisms in social manufacturing is simulated and compared as a case study to present the application of SLE framework. The results demonstrate that our method has a substantial promise.