A Cloud Manufacturing Service Management Model and Its Implementation

A Cloud Manufacturing Service Management Model and Its Implementation

Chun-mei Wei, Cheng-lei Zhang

School of Mechanical Engineering Hubei University of Technology

Wuhan 430068, China e-mail: songtx2006@163.com

Abstract—From the actual needs of small and medium-sized enterprises, this paper presents a cloud manufacturing services management model. With the transaction mode for multi-party collaboration, the workflows and core functionalities of this cloud manufacturing model were designed. Some key issues, such as intelligent matching engine for supply and demand, and transaction coordinating logic engine were discussed, which implement management of whole process for cloud manufacturing. As an example, we developed a cloud manufacturing service management platform for the industry of automobile and motorcycle, which effectively integrates manufacturing service resources in this field through online services and offline services, and achieves an effective management of manufacturing services.

Ting-xin Song, Bi-qing Huang

Department of Automation Tsinghua University Beijing 100084, China e-mail: hbq@tsinghua.edu.cn

The concept of cloud manufacturing originated from cloud computing, but there exists great difference between the two. Cloud computing is a operation system which is composed by large scale but low cost operation units that are connected by IP network and its core value is throttling, competition and opening source [2]. The limitation of cloud computing service model is that it can not easily solve the contradiction in the current manufacturing industry [3]. With the development and maturing of cloud computing technology and Internet of Things, cloud manufacturing emerged. Cloud manufacturing is a new service-oriented, high efficiency but low-energy and knowledge-based networked intelligent manufacturing model, its core idea is that getting all dispersed resources together and providing

Keywords-cloud manufacturing; supply-demand intelligent service dispersedly with these centralized resources [4]. This

new model realizes the integration of social resources in matching; transaction collaboration; online service management

manufacturing process, improving the utilization of resources and reducing the consumption of enterprise I.INTRODUCTION

resources, so providing a new direction for enterprises to

There are a large numbers of small and medium-sized steer to service. manufacturing enterprises in China, which contribute a lot to Western advanced manufacturing countries had carried the sustainable development of Chinese industrial economy, out some related work for cloud manufacturing and obtained but the worsening global financial crisis makes the demand a series of achievement. In 2000, the United States of international market constantly shrinking, so market space established a network platform called MFG.COM which of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises gets now is the world’s biggest manufacturing trading platform to serious extrusion. So it will be the most efficient measures provide fast and efficient service cooperation for global for manufacturing enterprises to speed up developing new manufacturing partners. In August 2010, the EU Seventh products with independent intellectual property rights, so as Framework started a manufacturing cloud project to provide to improve the market competitive power and open up new users configurable manufacturing capacity with the support market. How to solve the problem of lack of capital, of a Software-As-A-Service. technology, talented person and equipment for small and Chinese manufacturing industry is in the key period of medium-sized manufacturing enterprises now has been a transition from production-oriented to service-oriented, from major issue, many experts and scholars are actively low-end to high-end value chain and from “made in China” exploring and researching it [1]. to “created in China”. It can be predicted that researching Aiming at above questions, this paper presents a kind of and developing cloud manufacturing service in the next stage cloud manufacturing service model, and develops a cloud will be an important direction of our country’s manufacturing service platform for small and medium-sized manufacturing based on information technology. Its core is enterprises, which provides an important supported means to revitalize social manufacturing resources. And it mainly for small and medium-sized enterprises to make full use of studies some problems, which come from large-scale and share manufacturing resources and improve the ability production, long industrial chain, complex organizational on product designing, process, manufacturing, marketing and structures and bad cooperation between enterprises and so on. service. Cloud manufacturing service is becoming an At the same time, enterprise groups can rely on the cloud important development direction in advanced manufacturing manufacturing service platform to realize optimizing field which we need to explore currently. configuration of service resources and transaction

collaborative management between enterprises.

II.CLOUD MANUFACTURING SERVICE OVERVIEW

2165-3836/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEEDOI 10.1109/ICSS.2013.22

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III.

CLOUD MANUFACTURING SERVICE MANAGEMENT

MODEL

The idea of cloud manufacturing service model for small and medium-sized enterprises is that changing complex enterprise needs into enterprise order services and process management services. Only with a simply login, enterprise users can access to different enterprise services and search and match all released service resources, so as to access seamlessly and get these services resources they need ultimately. Considering the actual needs of small and medium-sized enterprises, we propose a kind of “222+2” cloud manufacturing service mode which includes two kinds of service providing methods, two kinds of service resources types, two kinds of participation roles, and two kinds of business and profiting models [5]. At the same time, it provides a centralized and convenient searching mode, a safe enterprise transaction and authority management approach, and it can also meet needs of enterprises users to use a web application system conveniently.

Based on the above designing idea, a service management platform, named as CloudManu, for small and medium-sized enterprises was implemented and its structure is showed as Figure 1.

CloudManu System Service resources intelligent matchingwhich capacity is matching, price is reasonable, transportation is convenient and credit is higher.

(5) The demand-side submits orders to CloudManusystem and signs contracts with the supply-side online. Then CloudManu system accepts these orders and sends them to the transaction coordinating logic engine to execute.

(6) The transaction coordinating logic engine tracks and manages orders, and guides the both sides to finish the whole process including online payment, progress feedback, delivery acceptance and transaction evaluation in accordance with business rules. Enterprise users can log on the system to inquire the transaction progress and order status at any time, and deal with those unfinished orders according to prompt.

IV.

KEYISSUESDISCUSS

According to the designing requirements of CloudManusystem, the focus we need to discuss is intelligent matching engine for supply and demand and transaction coordinating logic engine which reflect the core idea of cloud manufacturing services and directly decide whether this cloud manufacturing services management mode is suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises to research and develop new products in practice.

Cloud Manufacturing Service Platform User Needssearchingand matchingService resourcemanagementFigure 1. Cloud manufacturing service model

The workflow of this platform is as follows:

(1) When accessing this platform at the first time, enterprise users will submit their information to register, at the same time, their initial credit will be assessed based on the registration information.

(2) Identity verification. If registration is successful, users will be able to enter CloudManu system. If failing it will come back to registration page and needs to register again.

(3) The first thing for enterprise users to do is to release service resource information (supply-side) or demand information (demand-side) on CloudManu after successfully login, then users use the business process management tools to customize cloud manufacturing processes.

(4) The demand-side search service resources through the intelligent matching engine to find out those enterprises

for Small and Medium EnterprisesCloud DatabaseCloud Manufacturing Service Management PlatformTransaction task managementCredit assessment engine Knowledge classification polymerizationTransaction collaborationengine Process ManagementSupply-demand intelligent matchingCloud ServerA.The intelligent matching engine for supply and demand The intelligent matching engine for supply and demand integrates the mass information of service resources and shares and coordinates manufacturing resources as well as manufacturing capacity, so as to realize management such as the intellectual scheduling of service based on knowledge. In this paper, the keyword semantic intelligence searching is used. Enterprise users visit the homepage of CloudManusystem to search by inputting the key words that summarize the information of manufacturing service resource in a maximum degree. With the high-efficient search algorithm, CloudManu system will return data or services correlated with input keywords. So users can obtain the optimum service supports through the intelligent matching engine. In order to improve hit rate of keywords, we need to expand index condition and add some keywords according to

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synonyms and semantic words. The basic idea of query expansion is that considering the similarity between semantic concepts firstly and then expanding the semantic of every query word according to the level of similarity degree and the classification structure of service resources [6]. The computational process is as follows:

Assuming there are two keywords named as W1 and W2,ifW1 has n concepts, S11,S12,L,S1n, and W2 has mconcepts,S21,S22,L,S2m, then the similarity of A and Bis the maximum value of each concept’s similarity, namely

Sim(W1,W2)=maxSim(S1i,S2j) (1)

i=1Ln,j=1Lm

whereSim(S1,S2)is the similarity of concept, the

calculation method is

i4

(2)

Sim(S1,S2)=

¦

βi

i=1

∏

Sim

j

(S1,S2)

j=1

is the concept of the first word, S2is the whereS1

concept of the second word. βi(1≤i≤4) is an adjustable ˈparameter, and β1+β2+β3+β4=1

β1>β2>β3>β4. which reflects that impact factor is descending from Sim1 to Sim4in order in the overall similarity. In the process of similarity calculation, the concept is a key point for the computational process of similarity, because the adopted method is taking the maximum similarity of the concept as a word’s similarity. In the above-mentioned intelligence search algorithms, the most important thing is to build an enough concept synonym dictionary which can be realized by setting up classification structure or domain ontology of service

Cloud manufacturing business processContract has been signed and waiting for paymentList of ordersTask node (2)List of ordersTask node (3)List of ordersTask node (n)List of ordersProcess endContract has been signed and waiting for paymentFirst paymentBlue: completed taskService startService endRed: ongoing taskContract has been signed and waiting for paymentFirst paymentService startB.Transaction coordinating logic engine

In order to make users to manage their orders conveniently and realize communication and coordination of transaction tasks in the cloud manufacturing service platform, CloudManu system needs a transaction coordinating logic engine, which mainly offers three functions including business process management, transaction task guiding and order tracking.

The business process management helps the demand-side customize and manage its business process in cloud manufacturing services, forming a vertical management mode of the transaction task from top to bottom. The transaction task guiding aims at every node in the business process, tracks the status of every order in nodes and leads both sides to execute orders according to the business process, which forms a horizontal management mode in the transaction task from left to right. Enterprise users can build and revise a business process in the cloud manufacturing service platform according to their own business demand. Different transaction type has different horizontal transaction process. We designed four kinds of transaction types in this paper, including commission production, service outsourcing, leasing and tendering, and considered the situation that pays a bill for many times. Users can choose transaction type and payment times by themselves while placing an order, and the system can choose different task guiding template to guide transaction task automatically. Through the vertical and horizontal two kinds of management mode, transaction coordinating logic engine realizes transaction task management in the cloud manufacturing service platform, its workflow is shown in Figure 2.

Transaction task leading (Horizontal Management )Business logic guidingTask node (1)Online paymentService startService endService endSecond paymentService endSecond paymentGray: unfinished taskDeliveryThird paymentService end(Vertical Management)Order status tracking (use a different color to represent current order status)Figure 2. Transaction coordinating logic engine

resources. According to the characteristics of small and medium-size manufacturing enterprises, we take a keyword matching from four respects including function, data, service quality and execution when searching services, which will form a service recommend table for users to choose finally.

In above transactions task management processes (horizontal), we need to track and maintain order status data for real-time so as to achieve cooperation between supply-side and demand-side. Only those unfinished orders will be managed by transaction coordinating logic engine. During the transaction task guiding, operation permission of both

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characteristics decide that it is special. Cloud manufacturing service is not only a new advanced manufacturing mode, but also a new business mode, it can provide many high-quality services resources for different industries by building third-party service operation platform. Cloud manufacturing service platform provides transaction and task management in the early stage, while in the next stage, it will evolve into a big virtual manufacturing enterprise along with improvement of service manage ability and intelligent matching engine for supply and demand. A series of complex manufacturing

V.CASE STUDYbusiness processes such as service matching and transaction

As an example, CloudManu system is applied to management will be completed automatically as long as automobile industry. We select Xingguo Lamp Limited users submit their demands of manufacturing service into the Company in Chongqing as demand-side to verify this platform. For demand-sides, the enterprises which provide application. This company is engaged in research, service are transparent, they will face to a unified cloud development and production of lamp for automobile and manufacturing service provider which integrates all motorcycle. In recent years, along with market competition resources from many enterprises. intensifying and customer demands changing increasingly,

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

this company doesn’t have enough ability to design and

This work is partially supported by the Chinese National manage the production process of motorcycle lamp. After

investigation, we find that there are a large number of small Hi-Tech. R&D Program under grant 2011AA040504. and medium-sized enterprises engaging in the related process of this production. Finally, we collected information of more

REFERENCESthan 70 related enterprises in Chongqing area and registered

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ey Technology

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Beijing: Science Press, 2011. management, and improves the management efficiency in

production.

VI.

CONCLUSIONS

Cloud manufacturing service is different from traditional e-commerce, its complex transaction process and

sides will change with changing of order status. When order status changes to the operation permission of demand-side, the system will trigger a message to urge demand-side to finish inputting service status information, while this information will rewrite order status, afterwards the operating permission circulates to supply-side. Through both sides operating service status information in turn, CloudManu system realizes collaborative management of transaction tasks.

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