MANUCLOUD | Distributed Cloud product specification and supply chain manufacturing execution infrastructure

The transition from mass production to personalised, customer-oriented and eco-efficient manufacturing is considered to be a promising approach to improve and secure the competitiveness of the European manufacturing industries in the future, which constitute an important pillar of the European prosperity. One precondition for this transition is the availability of agile ICT systems supporting this level of flexibility on the production network layer on the one hand and on the factory and process levels on the other hand. The project ManuCloud has been setup with the mission to investigate the production-ICT related aspects for this transition and to develop and to evaluate a suitable ICT infrastructure to provide better support for on-demand manufacturing scenarios, taking multiple tiers of the value chain into account. On this path, ManuCloud seeks to implement the vision of a cloud-like architecture concept. It provides users with the ability to utilise the manufacturing capabilities of configurable, virtualised production networks, based on cloud-enabled, federated factories, supported by a set of software-as-a-service applications. Two major ICT-related R&D focal points have been selected for the project. The intra-factory environment is comprised of production-related ICT systems within a single factory which lays the foundation to connect the factory into the inter-factory environment. A layer above the automation systems will support service discovery, management and orchestration, allowing for quick development and deployment of new factory-level services. The implementation of automation system services will be integrated with the engineering process for these systems. The inter-factory environment serves as a market place for virtualised manufacturing services, and supports the dynamic, on-demand interconnection of multiple factories for specific purposes. It will provide facilities for joint specification management, shop-floor data transfer, high level of traceability and distributed quality management. A front-end system will support the dynamic configuration of virtual production networks and provide interfaces for product configurators, which are supported by a product design & manufacturing advisory subsystem. Furthermore, the project aims to develop configurable organic photovoltaic and lighting products and corresponding virtual value chains on top of the ManuCloud infrastructure.