A Review Of Cloud Manufacturing: Issues And Opportunities

Cloud Manufacturing (CM) is the latest manufacturing paradigm that enables manufacturing to be looked upon as a service industry.The aim is to offer manufacturing as a service so that an individual or organization is willing to manufacture products and utilize this service without having to make capital investment.However,industry adoption of CM paradigm is still limited.This paper compared the current adoption of CM by the industry with the ideal CM environment.The gaps between the two were identified and related research topics were reviewed. This paper also outlined research areas to be pursued to facilitate CM adoption by the manufacturing industry.This will also improve manufacturing resource utilization efficiencies not only within an organization but globally.At the end,the cost benefits will be passed down to end customer

A Review of Cloud Manufacturing: Issues and Opportunities

Cloud Manufacturing (CM) is the latest manufacturing paradigm that enables manufacturing to be looked upon as a service industry. The aim is to offer manufacturing as a service so that an individual or organization is willing to manufacture products and utilize this service without having to make capital investment. However, industry adoption of CM paradigm is still limited.  This paper compared the current adoption of CM by the industry with the ideal CM environment.  The gaps between the two were identified and related research topics were reviewed.  This paper also outlined research areas to be pursued to facilitate CM adoption by the manufacturing industry.  This will also improve manufacturing resource utilization efficiencies not only within an organization but globally.  At the end, the cost benefits will be passed down to end customer

Sustainability Benefits Analysis of CyberManufacturing Systems

Confronted with growing sustainability awareness, mounting environmental pressure, meeting modern customers’ demand and the need to develop stronger market competitiveness, the manufacturing industry is striving to address sustainability-related issues in manufacturing. A new manufacturing system called CyberManufacturing System (CMS) has a great potential in addressing sustainability issues by handling manufacturing tasks differently and better than traditional manufacturing systems. CMS is an advanced manufacturing system where physical components are fully integrated and seamlessly networked with computational processes. The recent developments in Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Fog Computing, Service-Oriented Technologies, etc., all contribute to the development of CMS. Under the context of this new manufacturing paradigm, every manufacturing resource or capability is digitized, registered and shared with all the networked users and stakeholders directly or through the Internet. CMS infrastructure enables intelligent behaviors of manufacturing components and systems such as self-monitoring, self-awareness, self-prediction, self-optimization, self-configuration, self-scalability, self-remediating and self-reusing. Sustainability benefits of CMS are generally mentioned in the existing researches. However, the existing sustainability studies of CMS focus a narrow scope of CMS (e.g., standalone machines and specific industrial domains) or partial aspects of sustainability analysis (e.g., solely from energy consumption or material consumption perspectives), and thus no research has comprehensively addressed the sustainability analysis of CMS. The proposed research intends to address these gaps by developing a comprehensive definition, architecture, functionality study of CMS for sustainability benefits analysis. A sustainability assessment framework based on Distance-to-Target methodology is developed to comprehensively and objectively evaluate manufacturing systems’ sustainability performance. Three practical cases are captured as examples for instantiating all CMS functions and analyzing the advancements of CMS in addressing concrete sustainability issues. As a result, CMS has proven to deliver substantial sustainability benefits in terms of (i) the increment of productivity, production quality, profitability & facility utilization and (ii) the reduction in Working-In-Process (WIP) inventory level & material consumption compared with the alternative traditional manufacturing system paradigms