Development and Implementation of Cloud Manufacturing: An Evolutionary Perspective

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) is a new service-oriented networked manufacturing paradigm. In a CMfg system, the operator of CMfg platform provides services for resource providers to publish their idle manufacturing resources and for resource demanders to access the resource pool on-demand. To uncover the underlying mechanism supporting the development and implementation of CMfg, a model of CMfg system is proposed by abstracting the CMfg operator as a third party and modeling the relationships of CMfg users using the scale-free network. We investigate the effect of saturation degree of manufacturing task and find that there exists an intermediate value of the parameter optimally favoring the participation of enterprises in CMfg. We also study the charging issue. The obtained result shows that the CMfg system is robust with respect to resource charge. Finally, we discuss the future work and conclude the paper.