Factory planning system considering energy-efficient process under cloud manufacturing

Cloud computing sets to make a change in business between enterprises over the Internet based on services providing dynamically reconfigurable and virtualized networks. It is difficult for an aircraft manufacturer to consider the performance and status of each factory (i.e., capacity, inventory, order, technology, etc.) because of the huge amount of suppliers. In legacy environments, the supplier consumed a long time to identify the machine and process required and the energy to be consumed in order to satisfy a new customer demand. If the process occurred with a new order should be optimized, additional time and cost were needed. Cloud computing can enable the relationship between the manufacturer and suppliers of aircraft, which is representative of mass customized products, to be flexible and efficient. In order to enhance the response time during contracting with suppliers, this paper focuses on an architecture, providing a service for a decision with the concerns about the time and cost as well as energy with regard to process planning. For realizing this service the manufacturer provides the process plan described using neutral language for numerical controllers called 'STEP-NC' which is independent from a specific machine tool. On the supplier side, the machinability check, tool path generation and energy use estimation should be identified with machine tool specifications described by STEP-NC. In the Cloud computing environment, the analysis is performed to check the possibility that a supplier can complete a new order from the manufacturer on the due date with the analysis of machine tools and on-going production schedule. This function is developed in a system which can be installed on a virtual platform and provided by a cloud service. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).