Högskolan i Skövde

The interest for implementing the concept of Manufacturing-as-a-Service is increasing as concepts for letting the manufacturing shop-floor domain take advantage of the cloud appears. Combining technologies such as Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Semantic Web, virtualisation and service-oriented technologies with advanced manufacturing models, information and communication technologies, Cloud Manufacturing (CM) is emerging as a new manufacturing paradigm. The ideas of on-demand, scalable and pay-for-usage resource-sharing in this concept will move manufacturing towards distributed and collaborative missions in volatile partnerships. This will require a control approach for distributed planning and execution of cooperating manufacturing activities. Without control based on both global and local environmental conditions, the advantages of CM will not be fulfilled.

By utilising smart and distributable decision modules such as event-driven FBs, run-time manufacturing operations in a distributed environment may be adjusted to prevailing manufacturing conditions. Packaged in a cloud service for manufacturing equipment control, it will satisfy the control needs in CM. By combining different resource types, such as hard, soft and capability resources, the cloud service Robot Control-as-a-Service can be realised.

This paper describes the functional perspective and enabling technologies for a control approach for robotic assembly tasks in CM, and describes a scenario for its implementation.