Toward Portable Cloud Manufacturing Services

Cloud-based manufacturing refers to an "as-a-service" manufacturing model that exploits on-demand access to a shared pool of diversified and distributed manufacturing resources. A product bill of materials (BOM) uses distributed manufacturing services for production purposes. Modeling BOMs poses challenges for distributed manufacturing plans, production policies, and its portability among multiple manufacturers. The authors employ the OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) and propose a TOSCA-based manufacturing mechanism that lets producers model and build their BOMs by composing diverse manufacturing services and resources using the TOSCA standard. This article views manufacturing services as marketable entities, thereby opening up opportunities for new, manufacturing-based business models such as manufacturing as a service, which will lead to large-scale, virtualized, composable business models in the manufacturing world.