Design, simulation and testing of a cloud platform for sharing digital fabrication resources for education

Gianluca Cornetta,Javier Mateos,Gabriel-Miro Muntean,Abdellah Touhafi

doi:10.1186/s13677-019-0135-x

Abstract

Cloud and IoT technologies have the potential to support applica- tions that are not strictly limited to technical fields. This paper shows how digital fabrication laboratories (Fab Labs) can leverage cloud technologies to enable resource sharing and provide remote access to distributed expensive fabrication resources over the internet. We call this new concept Fabrication as a Service (FaaS), since each resource is exposed to the internet as a web ser- vice through REST APIs. The cloud platform presented in this paper is part of the NEWTON Horizon 2020 technology-enhanced learning project. The NEWTON Fab Labs architecture is described in detail, from system concep- tion and simulation to system cloud deployment and testing in NEWTON project small and large-scale pilots for teaching and learning STEM subjects.

Highlights

Most developed countries are experiencing a shortage of scientists; for example, the proportion of students graduating in STEM (Science, Technology, Engi- neering and Mathematics) subjects in Europe has reduced from 12% to 9% since 2000 [1]
All the incoming requests are forwarded to the same fabrication machine, each test has a duration of 2 minutes and, as mentioned before, each simulated user performs the operations described in Table 1 which means that the following HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests are sent to the Fab Lab Application Programming Interface (API): 1. GET the available Fab Lab status
Fabrication as a Service (FaaS) Fab Lab deployment has been performed as part of the NEWTON plat- form

Summary

Introduction

Most developed countries are experiencing a shortage of scientists; for example, the proportion of students graduating in STEM (Science, Technology, Engi- neering and Mathematics) subjects in Europe has reduced from 12% to 9% since 2000 [1]. The Fab Lab Gateway dynamically collects in real time the information from all the machine wrappers, builds a snapshot of all the services available in the Fab Lab and exposes them through a set of APIs that can be consumed by the Cloud Hub application. All the incoming requests are forwarded to the same fabrication machine, each test has a duration of 2 minutes and, as mentioned before, each simulated user performs the operations described in Table 1 which means that the following HTTP requests are sent to the Fab Lab APIs: 1. Platform modelling The system stressed by the load tests described in Section 3.1 is a minimum deployment formed by the Cloud Hub located in the eu-central-1 AWS region (i.e., in the Amazon AWS data center in Frankfurt) and a single spoke node (i.e., the San Pablo-CEU Fab Lab located in Madrid).

Check that a fabrica- tion batch can be can- celled

Findings

Conclusions