Special Section: Advances and Challenges in Cloud Manufacturing

Abstract

Cloud computing (e.g., software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service) represents a newgeneration, serviceoriented business model in support of multiple companies for deploying and managing services over the Internet. Cloudbased manufacturing (or cloud manufacturing), on the other hand, would provide costeffective, flexible, and scalable solutions to companies by sharing complex manufacturing resources with lower support and maintenance costs. Cloud manufacturing implies an integrated cyberphysical system that can provide ondemand manufacturing services, digitally and physically, at the best utilization of manufacturing resources. It aims at offering a shared pool of resources such as manufacturing software tools, manufacturing facilities, and manufacturing capabilities. However, cloud manufacturing is more than simply deploying manufacturing software applications in the computing cloud. Besides data storage and virtual machines, the physical resources integrated in the manufacturing cloud must be able to offer adaptive, secure, and ondemand manufacturing services over the Internet of Things, including work cells, machine tools, robots, etc. Recently, cloud manufacturing has emerged as an imperative research area for developing comprehensive and userfriendly services for factories of the future. It leads to the need to publish this collection of research papers focusing on Advances and Challenges in Cloud Manufacturing, in a Special Section of this ASME Transactions, Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering. The 14 papers accepted to this issue include two technology reviews, ten original research articles, and two technical briefs, dealing with theoretical and experimental advances in this promising area, particularly addressing the current challenges. Emerging issues in serviceoriented architecture design, cloud platforms development, cloud manufacturing applications, scalability, and manufacturing services management are reported in addition to the stateoftheart literature surveys. A brief account of each paper is given below.