Cloud Manufacturing: a proof of concept of Manufacturing-as-a-Service

The UK’s economic prosperity increasingly depends on maintaining and expanding a resilient and sustainable manufacturing sector based on sophisticated technologies, relevant knowledge and skill bases, and a manufacturing infrastructure that has the ability to produce a high variety of complex products faster, better and more cheaply [1]. In this paper, we present Cloud Manufacturing – defined as an approach for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of manufacturing resources and capabilities that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Inspired by the cloud computing architecture [2, 3], we present advances towards a Manufacturing-as-a-Service platform built upon a collection of industrial use cases, a preliminary conceptual architecture, and a prototype implementation. Following discussion with the industrial project partners on their use case requirements, we identified four main categories of use case: those based on the Cloud Manufacturing Service Platform, which dealt with issues such as ordering, resource allocation, virtualisation, mass customisation/personalisation, platform access, and platform interface; those that were Data-driven, concerned with data analytics/management and supply-chain information; Privacy and Security concerns, which dealt with platform access and the linked, yet distinct, issues of data privacy and data security; and finally those that are related to the Manufacturing Network, globalising existing relationships into a social-like network of manufacturing companies and users, and dealing with the new business models that may arise from this change. As a result, we have designed a preliminary conceptual cloud manufacturing model in terms of independent but closely linked components – the Platform Core, Data-oriented components, Social-like networking, Security methodologies, Business Models, Privacy techniques, and the Interface – each derived to address the aforementioned industrial use case categories. In this piece of work, we focus on a four-layered architecture for the Platform Core composed of the Physical Layer, the Abstraction Layer, the Business Logic Layer and the Front-end. The Physical Layer refers to resources and capabilities within distributed manufacturing facilities. The Abstraction Layer defines software components embodying hardware, software and other type of resources seen at the Physical Layer along with interoperability strategies and high-level manufacturing descriptions. The Business Logic Layer outlines intelligent operational decisions such as optimisation strategies, constraint handling, and resource allocation methods. Inter-layer data-flow begins when a customer submits a product specification together with manufacturing constraints and customisations to the cloud through the Front-end. This manufacturing request is captured and processed by the Business Logic Layer which collects descriptive information from the Abstraction Layer and orchestrates virtualised resources and capabilities into a manufacturing process which is ultimately performed by geographically distributed entities at the Physical Layer. The aim of this paper is then to report on a proof-of-concept implementation of a Manufacturing-as-a-Service distributed platform built upon industrial requirements, resources and capabilities observed in manufacturing facilities, state-of-the-art computing technologies, and an open source cloud computing technology [4]. [1] P. Dickens, M. Kelly, J.R. Williams, What are the significant trends shaping technology relevant to manufacturing?, Foresight, UK Government Office for Science, 2013. [2] The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, National Institute of Standards and Technology. Last access on 23 May 2014. [3] X. Xu, From cloud computing to cloud manufacturing, Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 28(1):75, 2012. [4] K. Flanagan, S. Nakjang, J. Hallinan, C. Harwood, R.P. Hirt, M.R. Pocock, A. Wipat, Microbase2.0: A Generic Framework for Computationally Intensive Bioinformatics Workflows in the Cloud, Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics, 9(2):212, 2012.