EAGER/Cybermanufacturing: Architecture and Protocols for Scalable Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Systems

University Of Arkansas, Fayetteville AR

Investigators

Abstract

Cyber-physical manufacturing systems have potential to transform manufacturing industry in a significant fashion by sharing manufacturing resources, operating manufacturing machines, and connecting customers with manufacturing resources over the Internet. It integrates networking, embedded computing, control, manufacturing, service and cloud computing technologies to increase manufacturing efficiency and resource utilization. Despite its promising future, there are many significant and challenging issues in realizing the full potential of and wide adoption cyber-physical manufacturing in industry. One of them is the scalability of cyber-physical manufacturing systems. Cyber-physical manufacturing systems must be highly scalable to integrate the capabilities and services of a large number of manufacturing machines and other resources, operate and control them, and make them available to customers worldwide over the Internet. Another issue is network protocols for communicating manufacturing services and controlling manufacturing machines in factory floors over the Internet. In this EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project, new architectures and protocols for scalable cyber-physical manufacturing systems will be explored. The expected innovations will improve connections between manufacturers and consumers, ease the exchange of manufacturing services across organizational boundaries, and increase utilization of manufacturing resources and reduce their idle time. The research will be integrated into the instruction of several classes on computer science and advanced manufacturing in two institutions. The cyber-enabled manufacturing research will expand the reach of manufacturing facilities and tools and help broaden participation of underrepresented groups in research. Cyber-physical manufacturing systems are still in an early phase of their research and development. Several exploratory research tasks on the architecture and network protocols of scalable cyber-physical manufacturing systems will be carried out in this project. First, a service oriented architecture of scalable cyber-physical manufacturing systems, which links services of a large number of manufacturing machines from a variety of manufacturing service providers with customers over the Internet, will be investigated. Second, an Internet-scale manufacturing service protocol, which allows communication of manufacturing services across organizational boundaries over the Internet and enables plug-and-play of manufacturing machines in cyber-physical manufacturing systems, will be investigated. Third, a real-time Ethernet protocol, which enables real-time communication for monitoring and controlling manufacturing operations over the Internet, will be created. Fourth, a method of virtualization of manufacturing machines, which makes it easy to incorporate manufacturing resources in cyberspace for cyber-physical manufacturing systems, will be researched. Finally, a test bed will be developed for evaluation of the above techniques and methods.