Challenges and Opportunities for Publishing IIoT Data in Manufacturing as a Service Business

Abstract

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) can manage mass manufacturing (MM) resources and capabilities, and provide them as services via the Internet. Undoubtedly, multiple manufacturing clouds will have abundant services in terms of function, price, reliability, location, etc. The implementation of such concept in a wider structure than a single MC requires to provide explicit data about production sequence, machine allocation, production parameters, quality of service (QoS), and several other key performance indicators (KPIs). However, the state of the art approach is based on private access to such data, under specific contract requirements, and it becomes a limitation to the evolution of the concept itself. In particular it becomes limiting when the CMfgs involve multiple process owners distributed throughout a complex value creating network, such as production, logistics, quality control, but also, third parties like auditor interested in energy consumption, or machine maintenance provider, also interested in monitoring the effective usage of the machines, etc. This paper will analyze deeply the structural and functional characteristics of such CMfgs and then, it will propose a business intelligence architecture that aims to enable publishing relevant KPIs related to interested process data, with the convenient layer of trustworthiness. Such public access will enable the assessment to different agents at different time frequency and, finally, with different motivation, thus bringing practical information about time delays for the data availability and scalability factors.