Process and Production Planning in a Cloud Manufacturing Environment

Cloud manufacturing provides a way for manufacturing companies to rapidly form a flexible production network to respond to the growing demand of highly personalised products. Computer-aided Process Planning (CAPP) is an important element of production planning. However, existing methodologies failed to meet the requirements for CAPP systems in the cloud, which is a distributed, collaborative, and web-based environment. This paper discusses the requirements of CAPP systems in a cloud environment and proposes a feasible system framework for next-generation CAPP systems. The proposed system is built upon Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) architecture, which enables smooth system integration among different manufacturers. A two-stage strategy for generating feasible production plans for a given manufacturing request is discussed in this paper. Moreover, a feasible mechanism to incorporate shared engineering practices and knowledge from each manufacturer is also presented as part of the proposed system.