Enabling product customisation in manufacturing clouds

Cloud manufacturing has emerged as new manufacturing paradigm providing a service-oriented approach to integrate distributed manufacturing resources and to utilise available manufacturing capabilities for collaborative and networked production. With increasing demand for complex customer-oriented products, cloud manufacturing presents provides a promising solution to address the challenges involved in customised specification and production across the supply chain. In this chapter, a concept and architecture is proposed to enable the dynamic customisation of products based on the availabilities of the production network from the cloud manufacturing concept of Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS). An overview of the MaaS concept and architecture is described, which include the core components for product configuration, manufacturing service management and the integration of factory-IT systems. In addition, the proposed manufacturing service description used to enable the provision of customised options is presented. Finally, a case study is presented which demonstrates the feasibility of MaaS concept for customised products. This is followed by an evaluation of the implemented cloud manufacturing platform provided from an industrial perspective.