Cyber Physical Manufacturing Cloud: Architecture, Communication Methods, Testbed, and Applications

Cyber-physical systems are integrations of computation, networking, and physical processes and they are increasingly finding applications in manufacturing. Cloud manufacturing integrates cloud computing and service- oriented technologies with manufacturing processes and provides manufacturing services in manufacturing clouds. A cyber physical system for manufacturing is not a manufacturing cloud if it does not use virtualization technique in cloud computing and service oriented architecture in service computing. On the other hand, a manufacturing cloud is not cyber physical system if it does not have components for direct interactions with machine tools and other physical devices. In this poster, a new paradigm of Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) is introduced to fill gaps among cloud computing, cyber physical systems, and manufacturing. A CPMC allows direct operations and monitoring of machine tools in a manufacturing cloud over the Internet. A scalable service-oriented layered architecture of CPMC is presented. It allows publication and subscription of manufacturing web services and cross- platform applications in CPMC. A virtualization method of manufacturing resources in CPMC is discussed. In addition, we have developed an innovative communication method MTComm for exchanging manufacturing services over the Internet in CPMC. We also designed a new real-time communication protocol based on Ethernet standard to enable real-time processing for factory networks. A CPMC testbed has been developed and implemented based on the proposed architecture, virtualization technique, and communication methods. The testbed with multiple geographically distributed sites is fully operational. The developed testbed has been evaluated using several manufacturing scenarios. Its testing results demonstrate that it can monitor and execute manufacturing operations remotely over the Internet efficiently in a cyber physical manufacturing cloud.