Enterprises in Cloud Manufacturing: A Preliminary Exploration

Cloud manufacturing is a new manufacturing paradigm in which manufacturing resources and capabilities offered by different enterprises are provided as cloud-based services over the Internet. In addition to the cloud manufacturing platform, enterprises as resource providers are also essential part of a cloud manufacturing system as customer orders that are submitted to the cloud platform will ultimately need to be dispatched to enterprises’ production sites for execution. So far, however, issues concerning enterprises in cloud manufacturing has attracted little attention of researchers, and the most frequently mentioned issue in existing research that are concerned with enterprises is how to connect enterprises’ resources to the cloud infrastructure. This, to a large extent, hinders the development and implementation of cloud manufacturing as the lack of research on enterprises fails to uncover the requirements for enterprises in cloud manufacturing (i.e. Cloud Manufacturing Enterprises, CMEs), and thus enterprises have no reference for evaluating the changes that need to be made to adopt this new manufacturing paradigm. This paper focuses on this important issue and conducts a preliminary exploration on CMEs. We first analyze the requirements for CMEs, and then discuss some critical issues with CMEs in detail, including enterprise information systems, enterprise architecture, and enterprise modeling.