From Service Oriented to Cloud Powered Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Private clouds implementations have the potential to bring large scale virtualization in the flexible manufacturing systems realm at both shop-floor level and execution control level. However, virtualization of these legacy systems is not straight forward and requires a layered approach in order to gain the most out of the commonly known benefits and to build stable and sustainable systems. This paper presents the challenges and benefits of cloud adoption for service oriented manufacturing systems. The cloud adoption is realized by migration at top business applications layer to SaaS provided applications using public clouds as a delivery model. At lower levels (shop floor and manufacturing execution system) virtualization is realized using a private cloud implementation. The SOA bindings are setup within a cloud mediator module implementing a bus like functionality. The paper presents a prototype implementation of the proposed framework using a flexible manufacturing cell with six Adapt robots and a closed loop conveyor belt and IBM CloudBurst 2.1 private cloud. Based on the pilot implementation, a series of message propagation tests are performed to determine the virtualization overhead on real time messaging. The results are presented and discussed.