Open Arsenal

Access the Factory.

Distributed Manufacturing Infrastructure is an open-source specification for transforming conventional manufacturing plants into shared industrial facilities. Instead of requiring independent engineers, inventors, startups, and manufacturers to purchase or lease an entire factory, the system allows them to rent the specific machines, production cells, floor space, engineering resources, storage, tooling, robotics, and manufacturing services they need. Its goal is to make industrial manufacturing capacity accessible as infrastructure while allowing existing factories to generate revenue from underutilized equipment and space.

A central feature is AI-assisted facility conversion and management. AI can analyze an existing plant, evaluate machinery and utilities, identify underused space, recommend production zones, estimate infrastructure upgrades and retooling costs, and develop a phased conversion plan. Once operational, the AI Facility Manager can monitor capacity, equipment utilization, maintenance, inventory, production, finances, quality, safety, and demand while providing recommendations for pricing, equipment purchases, scheduling, staffing, maintenance, and facility expansion. Human operators retain control over safety-critical, financial, engineering, legal, and production decisions.

The platform includes comprehensive manufacturing, engineering, financial, scheduling, quality, intellectual property, inventory, procurement, shipping, and equipment marketplace modules. Its scheduling system can take a customer’s manufacturing request and determine the required machines, materials, tooling, fixtures, labor, inspection, preparation, retooling, packaging, and shipping requirements before producing a detailed time and price estimate. The financial system supports accounts receivable and payable, rent, machine usage, production charges, deposits, expenses, equipment financing, and facility profitability. Customers can also purchase or rent necessary protective equipment and access engineering, inspection, fulfillment, and other specialized services.

The specification is designed to grow beyond individual facilities into a distributed manufacturing network. Optional plugins can add CNC machining, robotics, additive manufacturing, laser manufacturing, welding, electronics manufacturing, composites, metrology, warehouse operations, energy management, predictive maintenance, automation, and other specialized capabilities. Multiple facilities can share manufacturing capacity, route production between locations, discover available equipment, and coordinate distributed production while maintaining independent facility operations. The result is a modular open-source infrastructure model built around a simple principle: Access the Factory.

This specification is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0+) and is free to use with required attribution under Section 7. Attribution-free deployment is available through a Specification Branding License, with fees based on deployment scope and network size.