Cloud manufacturing architectures: State-of-art, research challenges and platforms description

Abstract

The increasing incorporation of digital technologies in industrial systems in recent years, and their corresponding connection to the Internet of Things, has made it possible to offer production services through the cloud, giving rise to the Cloud Manufacturing production paradigm. This paradigm allows customers and production service providers to meet on a virtual platform, and from there, to generate business opportunities. In turn, different production service providers can associate with each other, in such a way that each one can enhance the level of service they offer or even take advantage of their idle capacity by offering it to other providers. These advantages have increased the interest in Cloud Manufacturing, yielding a wide number of architectures and systems that enable these interactions. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study about these architectures, as well as a review of the current literature on the subject. For this, a systematic review of the literature is reported. Based on an in-depth review of the selected works, we were able to identify the main contributions of the current state of the literature about Cloud Manufacturing architectures. Four lines of research were identified that should be strengthened and expanded in the future to continue with the development of this paradigm. These lines are: (i) digital twins developments, (ii) scheduling and logistics, (iii) services composition and resources sharing and (iv) interoperability. Finally, it is presented an open-source project for Cloud Manufacturing architectures and their implementation, which emerge from the literature review as a promising tool to leverage Cloud Manufacturing technologies.