Cloud Manufacturing Platform and Architecture Design

Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) is an emerging networked manufacturing paradigm and service-oriented manufacturing model, in which distributed manufacturing resources are made available by providers according to consumers’ requirements as on-demand manufacturing services via networks (manufacturing clouds) and cloud manufacturing service platforms. Considering the concept of cloud manufacturing and its operation principle, the paper designs and introduces new proposal of cloud manufacturing service platform architecture, including the following six layers: physical resources layer, soft resources layer, virtual resources layer, services layer, application layer and service-oriented interface layer. After surveying majority of papers introducing architectures of CMfg service platforms, the paper recommends to map both hard as well as soft resources into cloud services from resource layers to virtual resource layer which highlights the core idea of the concept. The paper discusses also the fundamentals of the CMfg paradigm, introduces three groups of actors that participate in a cloud manufacturing system, as well as indicates briefly a typical hierarchy architecture of cloud manufacturing system.