Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

Development of an online collaborative working environment for design and manufacturing

This research is to develop a novel collaborative working environment (CWE) for manufacturing and design using advanced Web/Internet technologies such as Web Service, Grid Service and other related software tools/packages. To achieve the above, the following research modules are developed by the author: A service oriented framework for computer aid design, which acts as an online collaboration system, has been developed with the utilisation of the latest technology, Web Service. The concept of Service-Oriented Architecture has been implemented in the framework. Users from anywhere in the world can join the design process from their PCs, no matter what operation system they are using. The service-oriented system has the capability of going through firewalls and can afford multi-users due to the characteristics of Web service. Also the loose-coupling structure makes the system very easy to be updated. Another module for the CWE is to solve the software sharing problem when the platform is used among several geographically dispersed users or organisations. A software package bank system has been developed, which utilised the ideology of service oriented approach and successfully solved traditional problems in this field. Based on the outcomes mentioned above, the research finally developed a more powerful infrastructure using Grid service, which is a further development of Grid computing and Web service. The Grid service is considered to be the most important future solvent for Internet

Mapping Big Data into Knowledge Space with Cognitive Cyber-Infrastructure

Big data research has attracted great attention in science, technology, industry and society. It is developing with the evolving scientific paradigm, the fourth industrial revolution, and the transformational innovation of technologies. However, its nature and fundamental challenge have not been recognized, and its own methodology has not been formed. This paper explores and answers the following questions: What is big data? What are the basic methods for representing, managing and analyzing big data? What is the relationship between big data and knowledge? Can we find a mapping from big data into knowledge space? What kind of infrastructure is required to support not only big data management and analysis but also knowledge discovery, sharing and management? What is the relationship between big data and science paradigm? What is the nature and fundamental challenge of big data computing? A multi-dimensional perspective is presented toward a methodology of big data computing.Comment: 59 page

Cloud manufacturing architecture: a critical analysis of its development, characteristics and future agenda to support its adoption

Purpose: In the last decade, cloud manufacturing (CMfg) has attracted considerable attention from academia and industry worldwide. It is widely accepted that the design and analysis of cloud manufacturing architecture (CMfg-A) are the basis for developing and applying CMfg systems. However, in existing studies, analysis of the status, development process and internal characteristics of CMfg-A is lacking, hindering an understanding of the research hotspots and development trends of CMfg-A. Meanwhile, effective guidance is lacking on the construction of superior CMfg-As. The purpose of this paper is to review the relevant research on CMfg-A via identification of the main layers, elements, relationships, structure and functions of CMfg-A to provide valuable information to scholars and practitioners for further research on key CMfg-A technologies and the construction of CMfg systems with superior performance. Design/methodology/approach: This study systematically reviews the relevant research on CMfg-A across transformation process to internal characteristics by integrating quantitative and qualitative methods. First, the split and reorganization method is used to recognize the main layers of CMfg-A. Then, the transformation process of six main layers is analysed through retrospective analysis, and the similarities and differences in CMfg-A are obtained. Subsequently, based on systematic theory, the elements, relationships, structure and functions of CMfg-A are inductively studied. A 3D printing architecture design case is conducted to discuss the weakness of the previous architecture and demonstrate how to improve it. Finally, the primary current trends and future opportunities are presented. Findings: By analyzing the transformation process of CMfg-A, this study finds that CMfg-A resources are developing from tangible resources into intangible resources and intelligent resources. CMfg-A technology is developing from traditional cloud computing-based technology towards advanced manufacturing technology, and CMfg-A application scope is gradually expanding from traditional manufacturing industry to emerging manufacturing industry. In addition, by analyzing the elements, relationships, structure and functions of CMfg-A, this study finds that CMfg-A is undergoing a new generation of transformation, with trends of integrated development, intelligent development, innovative development and green development. Case study shows that the analysis of the development trend and internal characteristics of the architecture facilitates the design of a more effective architecture. Research limitations/implications: This paper predominantly focuses on journal articles and some key conference papers published in English and Chinese. The reason for considering Chinese articles is that CMfg was proposed by the Chinese and a lot of Chinese CMfg-A articles have been published in recent years. CMfg is suitable for the development of China’s manufacturing industry because of China’s intelligent manufacturing environment. It is believed that this research has reached a reliable comprehensiveness that can help scholars and practitioners establish new research directions and evaluate their work in CMfg-A. Originality/value: Prior studies ignore the identification and analysis of development process and internal characteristics for the current development of CMfg-A, including the main layers identification of different CMfg-As and the transformation process analysis of these main layers, and in-depth analysis of the inner essence of CMfg-A (such as its elements, relationships, structure and functions). This study addresses these limitations and provides a comprehensive literature review

Cloud Manufacturing Model to Optimise Manufacturing Performance

Being predicted as the future of modern manufacturing, cloud-based manufacturing has drawn the attention of researchers in academia and industry. Researches are being done towards transforming every service in to cloud based service-oriented manufacturing mode in the manufacturing industry. There are many challenges that would arise when travelling towards this paradigm shift which is being addressed by researchers, but there are very few researches that concentrate on the elastic capability of cloud. Elastic capability makes this paradigm unique from all the other approaches or technologies. If elasticity is not achievable then the necessity of migrating to cloud is unnecessary. So, it is imperative to identify if at all it is necessary to adopt cloud-based manufacturing mode and discuss the issues and challenges that would arise to achieve elasticity when shifting to this emerging manufacturing paradigm. This research explores the importance of adopting cloud-based manufacturing mode to improve manufacturing performance based on the competitive priorities such as cost, quality, delivery and flexibility and proposes an elasticity assessment tool to be included in the cloud-based manufacturing model for the users to assess the challenges and issues on the realisation of elasticity on the context of manufacturing, which is the novelty of this research. The contribution to knowledge is a clear understanding of the necessity of cloud based elastic manufacturing model in the manufacturing environment for the manufacturing SMEs to gain a competitive advantage by achieving the competitive priorities such as low-cost, high-quality, and on-time delivery. Finally, the research suggests the best combination of manufacturing parameters that has to be emphasised to improve the manufacturing performance and gain a competitive advantage

A new MDA-SOA based framework for intercloud interoperability

Cloud computing has been one of the most important topics in Information Technology which aims to assure scalable and reliable on-demand services over the Internet. The expansion of the application scope of cloud services would require cooperation between clouds from different providers that have heterogeneous functionalities. This collaboration between different cloud vendors can provide better Quality of Services (QoS) at the lower price. However, current cloud systems have been developed without concerns of seamless cloud interconnection, and actually they do not support intercloud interoperability to enable collaboration between cloud service providers. Hence, the PhD work is motivated to address interoperability issue between cloud providers as a challenging research objective. This thesis proposes a new framework which supports inter-cloud interoperability in a heterogeneous computing resource cloud environment with the goal of dispatching the workload to the most effective clouds available at runtime. Analysing different methodologies that have been applied to resolve various problem scenarios related to interoperability lead us to exploit Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods as appropriate approaches for our inter-cloud framework. Moreover, since distributing the operations in a cloud-based environment is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP-complete) problem, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based job scheduler proposed as a part of interoperability framework, offering workload migration with the best performance at the least cost. A new Agent Based Simulation (ABS) approach is proposed to model the inter-cloud environment with three types of agents: Cloud Subscriber agent, Cloud Provider agent, and Job agent. The ABS model is proposed to evaluate the proposed framework.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - (Referencia da bolsa: SFRH SFRH / BD / 33965 / 2009) and EC 7th Framework Programme under grant agreement n° FITMAN 604674 (http://www.fitman-fi.eu