Cloud Manufacturing

Nowadays, Cloud Computing technology is providing a new way to do business by offering a scalable, flexible service over the Internet. It creates new solutions and opportunities to the modern enterprises, including the manufacturing industry. In this chapter, the essential features of Cloud Computing are discussed followed by a Cloud Manufacturing concept. In the second part, a service-oriented system called Interoperable Cloud-based Manufacturing System (ICMS) is proposed. ICMS provides a Cloud-based environment integrating existing and future manufacturing resources by packaging them using the Virtual Function Block mechanism and standardized description.

Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) are one of the most significant waste streams in modern societies. In the past decade, disassembly of WEEE to support remanufacturing and recycling has been growingly adopted by industries. With the increasing customization and diversity of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE) and more complex assembly processes, full disassembly of WEEE is rarely an ideal solution due to high disassembly cost. Selective disassembly, which prioritizes operations for partial disassembly according to the legislative and economic considerations of specific stakeholders, is becoming an important yet still challenging research topic in recent years. In this chapter, a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-based selective disassembly planning method embedded with customizable decision-making models and a novel generic constraint handling algorithm has been developed. With multi-criteria decision making models, the developed method is flexible to handle WEEE to meet the various requirements of stakeholders. Based on the generic constraint handling and intelligent optimization algorithms, the research is capable to process complex constraints and achieve optimized selective plans. Practical cases on Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) televisions have been used to verify and demonstrate the effectiveness of the research in different application scenarios. A distributed environment to deploy the service for remote access and control has been designed to support collaborative work.

As outsourcing demands related to machining task are appearing to be increasingly explosive in recent years, especially in small and medium size manufacturing enterprises, a new production and operation phenomenon characterized by outsourcing machining services has emerged consequently. But the distributed machining resources (MRs) in the society limit the execution of these outsourced tasks. Under this circumstance, a Cloud Machining Community (CMC) is proposed in this chapter mainly focusing on outsourced tasks related to machining processes and parts. Furthermore, it could integrate the distributed socialized MRs and provide customers with on-demand machining services to fulfill all the outsourced tasks. The comprehensive framework and operation mode are established firstly, and roles classification in CMC is also talked about. Then, three key enabling technologies are put forward and analyzed in detail, namely virtual access of socialized machining resources, broadcasting and contracting of outsourcing tasks, and machining process monitoring towards a specific outsourcing task. A simple use case fashioning a torque arm of an airplane undercarriage is studied so as to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the proposed framework and technologies. Finally, some conclusions are drawn at the end of this article.

The idea that drives Cloud technology shows great opportunities that can be exploited by an organization. However, with such opportunities come some challenges and factors that have to be put into consideration. Knowing and understanding these factors make an organization better prepared for adopting the technology. A number of factors have been suspected to affect organization’s adoption of Cloud technology. The purpose of this chapter is to confirm which factors actually do affect adoption of the technology. Inspired by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and an extensive literature review, a working hypothesis of the list of factors that have potentials to affect Cloud technology adoption was developed. These factors were then assessed by a randomly selected sample of 47 working professionals in the United Kingdom through an online questionnaire. Analysis of the result shows that Security, Cost, Service Availability, Compliance and Perceived Usefulness are factors of concern that organizations would have to deeply consider before moving to the Cloud. It also shows that majority of professionals are already aware and substantially educated about cloud technology and believe they will find the technology easy to learn and use. They also recommend it to organizations.

A system paradigm is an abstract representation of the system; it is the system architecture that determines the types and numbers of the components and their relations in operation and interaction of the system. Its selection relies on customers’ requirements and manufacturing environment. Many system paradigms have been proposed. However, most of them are based on an assumption that the life-cycle and boundary of a system can be defined based on the customers’ requirements. Since sustainability becomes essential to today’s manufacturing systems, a new concern is how to evolve existing paradigms to meet new challenges. The objectives of this chapter are, therefore, to examine the manufacturing requirements in a wider scope, to revisit existing paradigms to clarify the limitations and bottlenecks, and eventually to identify future research directions towards sustainable manufacturing. Within the context, this chapter focuses more on Reconfigurable and Cloud manufacturing system paradigms, and highlights the future endeavors towards better sustainability.

Sustainability has become a critical driving force shaping the future of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) management. In this research, lifecycle information and flow management has been investigated to enable transition from the current “management authority-centric reporting model for WEEE” to a new “globally distributed and sustainable management model for WEEE”. In order to achieve the target, case studies on LCD TV WEEE have been conducted to understand supply chain information flows and recovery and remanufacturing processes. Based on that, information/flow framework design for WEEE management has been explored.

One of the challenging problems that hinder the development of Cloud-based collaborative systems is the contradiction of large design or manufacturing visualization data and the limited bandwidth of the Internet and Web to share the data remotely to support collaborative work. Faster visualization of design and manufacturing models during collaboration has been needed for a long time. Recently, a new scheme for visualization has been presented, viz., the 3D streaming technology. 3D streaming technique can allow effective dispatch and access of large-volume design and manufacturing data as a series of patched streams across the Internet, and therefore provide a promising solution to overcome the obstacle. The key technology to realize the streaming technique is geometric simplification (or decimation) of 3D models. In this chapter, a new streaming technology based on a geometric simplification algorithm has been developed, in which two criteria are the crucial elements to control the collapse process for edges in 3D visualization models represented in VRML. After the simplification and sharing of a model, a developed refinement algorithm is carried out to restore the model from its simplified version back to its original, through combining the simplified model with some reconstruction data generated during the simplification process, therefore, to realize the streaming information sharing. The major feature of the streaming algorithm is that it has incorporated some advantages of the previously developed vertex decimation approach and edge collapse approach. Meanwhile, the mechanism of adaptive threshold parameters adopted in this work enhances the adaptability of the algorithm for various applications. Case studies and comparisons with some related works have been carried out to demonstrate the performance and potentials of the algorithm in terms of efficiency, adaptability and robustness.

The design and development of complex products entails the collaborative work of multidisciplinary and geographically distributed teams. The collaborative work largely depends on the effective sharing and integration of information and computing powers in a distributed environment, and thus raises the need of supplying flexible and accessible information for next generation design systems. Current design systems and tools are mainly focused on specific aspects such as design, analysis, and manufacturing while the need of integrated and collaborative development is not yet addressed. In this research, a paradigm of designing by services is envisaged which is aimed at supporting collaborative product development by integrating information and computing powers provided as services by organizations with relevant expertise. Such a paradigm requires a flexible architecture and the support of information technologies as it involves a large amount of complex information about products, processes, and people. This book chapter presents a paradigm of designing by services, describes the devising of a service oriented architecture for design systems for this paradigm, discusses the key enabling technologies involved, and introduces the development of a collaborative simulation using service oriented computing as a case study of software systems implementation.

Recent developments in wireless technologies have created opportunities for developing next-generation manufacturing systems (NGMS) with real-time traceability, visibility and interoperability in shop-floor planning, execution and control. This chapter proposes a referenced infrastructure of Ubiquitous Manufacturing (UM). Under this infrastructure, a Smart Gateway and a real-time work-in-progress management system (WIPMS) based on smart objects such as RFID/Auto-ID devices and web service technologies are designed to manage and control the real-time materials flow and information flow to improve the optimal planning and control of the entire shop-floor. During manufacturing execution stage, they can provide operators and supervisors with real-time status and information of current manufacturing environment. It follows a simple but effective principle: what you see is what you do and what you do is what you see. Production disturbances could thus be detected and fed back to decision makers for implementing closed-loop shop-floor control. For manufacturing information sharing and integration, a work-in-progress markup language (wipML) is used to establish the information model and schemas of WIP based on some important standards such as ISA 95 and B2MML. Then, the real-time manufacturing information can be effectively encapsulated, shared and exchanged between Smart Gateways, WIPA and heterogeneous enterprise information systems (EISs). Finally, the presented framework is demonstrated through a near real-life simplified shop-floor that consists of typical manufacturing objects.

Nowadays, product design and manufacturing industries have shown increasingly strong requirements of using new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to address more complex collaborative product development processes and higher expectation of customers dispersed globally. A new research area called Distributed Collaborative Engineering (DCE) has emerged in recent years in response to the aforementioned trend. Based on the rapid advancement of ICT, such as Internet, Web and Cloud Computing, DCE has become one of the most active and emerging R&D areas in the past two decades facilitating product design and realization processes, with a bid to support relevant teams to carry out distributed collaborative work effectively. DCE has progressed dramatically, and more and more research and engineering systems have been developed in order to achieve the full potential of DCE for various industrial applications. Rooted from Concurrent Engineering or Simultaneous Engineering, DCE has been expended in terms of depth and width, and relevant research and engineering systems are now far beyond traditional definitions and working scopes. This chapter presents a review of the R&D literature in the area, from the developed technologies of the 1980s to today’s state-of-the-art. Research challenges and opportunities are also discussed and highlighted in the end.

Today’s budgets are tighter than those at any time in recent history. However, despite severe budget constraints, military demands for highly dynamic federated mission are still increasing especially toward Information Technology (IT). This introduces new challenges for organizations. They are moving from a device-centric view of IT toward a view that is application, people, and information centric. Military organizations are not excluded from this new process which is the fundament of a new theory called Network Enabled Capability (NEC). In addition, the requirements of timeliness, accuracy, ubiquity, assurance and security, rapid exchange of information in the battlefield across all pieces and organizations are the leverage to accomplish the military mission and fundamental for the command and control process also defined with the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act cycle ( OODA). Cloud Computing aligns, on one hand, with this new world view and challenges, as the existing infrastructures can be used more efficiently and expanded quicker and leverage the implementation of NEC in the military operations where concepts like information assurance, information sharing, flexibility and scalability are getting more and more important. On the other hand it raises new threats and issues such as the erosion of trust boundaries, ubiquitous connectivity, the amorphous nature of information interchange, the ineffectiveness of traditional static security controls, and the dynamic nature of Cloud services. All this requires new thinking and a new knowledge management approach. However, the new service models, operational models and new technology employed to enable the implementation of Cloud Computing may present different risks and additional requirements to the organization. Especially military specific requirements and priorities need to be considered when moving towards tactical Collaborative Cloud. The information exchange requirements in the military operation/mission are growing and getting more complex. In addition security mechanisms and processes often hamper the mission to keep pace with the environmental conditions. Methods such as Reach Back or Home Base clarify that also the military perimeter has changed and modern Command, Control and Information System (CCIS) are best practice for Cloud Computing. This chapter will describe the landscape of Cloud Computing and will focus the view on the possibility of implementing this new concept in the military world. The strengths and the weakness that the implementation of Cloud Computing can introduce in the military operations will be highlighted. In addition, an analysis on what Cloud Computing introduces in the NEC is presented as a starting point for future and more specific studies.