A front-end system to support cloud-based manufacturing of customised products

In today’s global market, customized products are amongst an important means to address diverse customer demand and in achieving a unique competitive advantage. Key enablers of this approach are existing product configuration and supporting IT-based manufacturing systems. As a proposed advancement, it considered that the development of a front-end system with a next level of integration to a cloud-based manufacturing infrastructure is able to better support the specification and on-demand manufacture of customized products. In this paper, a new paradigm of Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS) environment is introduced and highlights the current research challenges in the configuration of customizable products. Furthermore, the latest development of the front-end system is reported with a view towards further work in the research

Usage Frequency of Product Configuration Systems Relative to Integrations and Fields of Application

Product Configuration Systems (PCS) are automatic solutions that can support and facilitate the sales and engineering processes. PCSs have recently attracted increased attention both from the researchers and practitioners. There are a variety of challenges reported in the literature as consequences of using PCS, which reduces the usage frequency of the system. To address those challenges, IT integrations can be an effective solution to reduce the number of manual tasks and complexity inside PCSs and make PCSs more user-friendly. However, the influence of integrating PCS to different IT systems on usage frequency has not been addressed in the literature. This paper aims to study the relationship of PCS usage frequency in terms of (1) different application area of the PCSs, and (2) integrations to different IT systems. The research method adopted in the paper is survey-based conducted in one company where the unit of analysis is operating PCS

Policy-Based Management of a Secure Dynamic and Multipoint Virtual Private Network

Although IP VPN technology has recently been imposed because of its cost effectiveness and that several research studies have been proposed for centralized policy management of intra / inter VPN domain, most solutions are only addressed to VPN site-to-site technology, according to our researches no centralized management model based on a server for dynamic multipoint VPN networks was proposed. In this paper we propose a model 201C;DMVPN Security Management System201D;for centralized policy management of dynamic multipoint multi-architectures VPN network, using a new web interface. We have implemented and tested the model on Single Hub Single Cloud architecture consisting of ten Spokes, the time required for an expert on VPN networks for manual set up of this architecture is an hour, we moved that to five minutes with our model, in addition to time effectiveness the margin error is null

Complexity of Configurators Relative to Integrations and Field of Application

Configurators are applied widely to automate the specification processes at companies. The literature describes industrial application of configurators supporting both sales and engineering processes, where configurators supporting the engineering processes are described more challenging. Moreover, configurators are commonly integrated to various IT systems within companies. Complexity of configurators is an important factor when it comes to performance, development and maintenance of the systems. Yet, a direct comparison of the complexity based on the different application and IT integrations is not addressed to great extent in the literature. Thus, this paper analyses the relationship of complexity of the configurators, which is based on parameters (rules and attributes), in terms of first different applications of configurators (sales and engineering), and second integrations to other IT systems. The research method adopted in the paper is based on a survey followed with interviews where the unit of analysis is based on operating configurators within a company