CLOUD MANUFACTURING - TOWARDS RESILIENT AND SCALABLE HIGH VALUE MANUFACTURING

UK economic prosperity will increasingly depend on maintaining and further expanding a resilient and sustainable manufacturing sector based on sophisticated technologies, relevant knowledge and skill bases, and manufacturing infrastructure that has the ability to produce a high variety of complex products faster, better and cheaper. In high labour cost economies, manufacturing competitiveness will depend on maximising the utilisation of all available resources, empowering human intelligence and creativity, and capturing and capitalising on available information and knowledge for the total product lifecycle from design, through production, use and maintenance to recycling. It will also require an infrastructure that can quickly respond to consumer and producer requirements and minimise energy, transport, materials and resource usage while maximising environmental sustainability, safety and economic competitiveness.

Building on the latest developments in Informatics, Computer Science, Operations Research, and Manufacturing Systems Science, we will address these needs with a research programme centred on the concept of 'Cloud Manufacturing', which has been defined as ''a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable manufacturing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction''. The research will adopt the methods of cloud computing and crowdsourcing. The 'cloud' allows a range of data sources within design and manufacturing processes to be shared and mined to enable process optimisation and increase responsiveness; the crowds encompass manufacturing partners, designers, logistics partners, and consumers who are sources of potentially valuable data, information and product and process knowledge that can be elicited for optimising complex manufacturing environments. The approach admits new models for open innovation within the manufacturing space, enabling new enterprises to arise without a need for a large capital investment. The research programme is a radical departure from the current philosophy of manufacturing ICT - it will create a framework for participatory contribution of information from the actual manufacturing entities and support services to the consumers and users of products. This transformational approach presents theoretical, technical, practical, ethical and social challenges that we will meet through new fundamental multidisciplinary research.


Whilst there have been some tentative steps taken to harness cloud concepts in manufacturing the theoretical methods, infrastructure and scientific knowledge needed to deliver the full potential of future cloud manufacturing have yet to be established. We aim to develop a holistic framework and understand its role within global manufacturing networks through: seeking the appropriate products, sectors, scales and volumes; identifying the impacted lifecycle stages from design to manufacture, maintenance and re-cycling; understanding how new product design and manufacturing will be influenced by lifecycle data; and finally analysing how future products will be influenced by cloud manufacturing enabling local on-demand supply of components and services. Cloud Manufacturing provides far reaching opportunities but has major research challenges including: understanding the diverse resource base, both in design collateral and production facilities; incorporating and integrating customer/user intelligence; and the representation and processing of information within a secure open service-oriented platform.

The research will benefit the international research community by establishing a long-term research agenda in Cloud Manufacturing Informatics as a multidisciplinary research theme at the interface between manufacturing engineering, computer science, human factors and operations management. Beyond the interdisciplinary academic beneficiaries, the project will target two key beneficiary groups: the commercial private sector (large OEMs and supply chain organisations) and the wider community. Our work will benefit the national and international commercial private sector, with particular focus on UK manufacturing companies, through supply chain networks who will have the potential to engage with new manufacturing partners, enhancing utilisation of capital infrastructure and contributing to, and exploiting, new integrated resources, knowledge, skills and data sets. Our close collaboration with the industry stakeholders will ensure direct impact across multiple manufacturing sectors. The wider public will benefit from the research by increased ability of organisations to respond to customer needs, reduced product cost due to ability of companies to source optimal supplies in a timely manner, and swifter development of new products that take advantage of emerging advances in science and engineering. Our work will ultimately enable a shortened product life cycle, increased opportunity for new, small and independent members of the supply chain, and selection of optimal and individualised manufacturing data, networks and services. Our approach of building an underlying architecture, using simulated and real-world data to test and populate models, and working closely with industry stakeholders will ensure scalable approaches that will be transferable between different manufacturing sectors.
The research cluster will deliver several limited early industrial pilot demonstrators. Although the focus of the cluster is basic research with a long-term application agenda, some of the results are expected to reach market earlier. Intra-enterprise and strategic supply chain-based applications of Cloud Manufacturing for efficient deployment and utilisation of geographically distributed resources will be demonstrated via the aerospace pilot demonstrator environment targeting the Airbus future aircraft coming in production by 2030. Similar research exemplars will be used to demonstrate future applications in nano-bio and feedstock processing, data and resources crowdsourcing in the automotive supply chain and building the future Cloud Manufacturing IT infrastructure with the support of our partners. Strong industrial engagement will also be ensured via our role in the MTC (Manufacturing Technology Centre) and its membership in the HVM Catapult as well as our joint activities with the Midlands Aerospace Alliance (MAA) who will provide access to more than 200 SMEs for data collection and early piloting of the Cloud Manufacturing in an SME based supply chain environment.
The team will establish close links with PhD projects within the Manufacturing, EFET and Horizon DTCs, and have specific networking and outreach goals to transfer knowledge between different disciplinary perspectives, develop the careers of future research leaders, and debate research issues with a range of stakeholders. A series of knowledge sharing seminars with participation from both research cluster members and other academic and industrial stakeholders will be organised. Early career researchers and PhD students will be encouraged to build research leadership skills, in particular through researcher-led speculative studies.