Reconsidering the Relationship between Cloud Computing and Cloud Manufacturing

International audienceHistory shows many relations between computer science and manufacturing processes, starting with the initial idea of " digital manufacturing " in the 70's. Since then, advances in computer science have given birth to the Cloud Computing (CC) paradigm, where computing resources are seen as a service offered to various end-users. Of course, CC has been used as such to improve the IT infrastructure associated to a manufacturing infrastructure, but its principles have also inspired a new manufacturing paradigm Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) with the perspective of many benefits for both the manufacturers and their customers. However, despite the usefulness of CC for CMfg, we advocate that considering CC as a core enabling technology for CMfg, as is often put forth in the literature, is limited and should be reconsidered. This paper presents a new core-enabling vision toward CMfg, called Cloud Anything (CA). CA is based on the idea of abstracting low-level resources, beyond computing resources, into a set of core control building blocks providing the grounds on top of which any domain could be " cloudified "