Today's unpredictable variability in customer demand is a major challenge for manufacturing companies, which often have to keep extra resources to meet deadlines during overloaded periods. However, these resources remain unused during periods with lower loads. The aim of the research is to develop resource sharing methods that are applicable in distributed manufacturing structures and allow the parallel requesting and offering of manufacturing resources. One way to achieve this type of collaboration is so-called crowdsourcing, whereby an organization outsources jobs traditionally done internally to a group of external, independent organizations, typically online. First, the related literature is reviewed, starting with the distributed production structures, then going into more details on the topic of collaborative sharing of manufacturing resources. The literature on agents, multi-agent systems and agentbased simulation – as a tool for testing and validating resource sharing mechanisms – is also briefly reviewed. Next, the developed direct exchange-based resource sharing mechanism is presented, highlighting the communication mechanism, the computation of the available resources, and the decision logic of the participants. Then, a platform-based resource sharing mechanism is detailed, focusing on the central role and the request-offer matching logic of the platform. The presented results are tested and validated using an agent-based simulation model and a detailed overview of the architecture of this model is also provided. Next, the topic of trust models is introduced: after a detailed literature review, an evaluation system is suggested, which is based on delivery time accuracy helping participants' decision-making. The benefits of considering the trust factor and the effect of manufacturing lead time prediction accuracy are also investigated using the simulation model. In the thesis, direct communication and platform-based resource sharing models are also compared based on different aspects, as well, an economic model for platform-based resource sharing is described. In the financial model, the different cost and revenue types of the manufacturing companies and for the platform are formalized one by one. The financial advantages and disadvantages of joining the platform are also discussed. Finally the financial model is tested with agent-based simulation, and then the contents of the thesis, new research results, areas of application and possible future research directions are summarized.