Abstract
Fabrication as a Service (FaaS) is a new concept developed within the framework of the NEWTON Horizon 2020 project. It is aimed at empowering digital fabrication laboratories (Fab Labs) by providing hardware and software wrappers to expose numerically-controlled expensive fabrication equipment as web services. More specifically, FaaS leverages cloud and IoT technologies to enable a wide learning community to have remote access to these labs’ computer-controlled tools and equipment over the Internet. In such context, the fabrication machines can be seen as networked resources distributed over a wide geographical area. These resources can communicate through machine-to-machine protocols and a centralized cloud infrastructure and can be digitally monitored and controlled through programmatic interfaces relying on REST APIs. This paper introduces FaaS in the context of Fab Lab challenges and describes FaaS deployment within NEWTON Fab Labs, part of the NEWTON European Horizon 2020 project on technology enhanced learning. The NEWTON Fab Labs architecture is described in detail targeting software, hardware and network architecture. The system has been extensively load-tested simulating real use-case scenarios and it is presently in production. In particular, this paper shows how the measured data has been used to build a simulation model to estimate system performance and identify possible bottlenecks. The measurements performed show that the platform delays exhibit a tail distribution with Pareto-like behaviour; this finding has been used to build a simple mathematical model and a simulator on top of CloudSim to estimate the latencies of the critical paths of the NEWTON Fab Lab platform under several load conditions.
Highlights
Most developed countries are presently experiencing a negative trend as regards the interest of the young generation to pursue a scientific education
Prior to running all the experiments, we have to make sure that the mathematical model we have developed for the cloud application behaves as expected
In this work we have introduced the concept of Fabrication as a Service (FaaS) in the context of NEWTON Fab Labs
Summary
Most developed countries are presently experiencing a negative trend as regards the interest of the young generation to pursue a scientific education. In Europe alone, the proportion of graduates specializing in science, technology (e.g., computing), engineering and mathematics (STEM). There is strong evidence that young people disengagement from the STEM subjects starts during secondary education [2]. The disengagement is mainly due to two factors: Students perceive scientific subjects as difficult, and they regard science-related careers as not so attractive in terms of job Computers 2019, 8, 47; doi:10.3390/computers8020047 www.mdpi.com/journal/computers. The most interesting and effective approaches to tackle the problem of the lack of interest in science and technology involve acting as early as possible (e.g., in secondary schools) and making use of the latest innovative technologies and solutions. Using Fabrication Laboratories or Fab Labs [3] is an innovative solution which is both attractive for students and highly effective in terms of STEM teaching and learning
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