The real Cloud and Ubiquitous Manufacturing systems require effectiveness and permanent availability of resources, their capacity and scalability. One of the most important problems for applications management over cloud based platforms, which are expected to support efficient scalability and resources coordination following SaaS implementation model, is their interoperability. Even application dashboards need to easily incorporate those new applications, their interoperability still remains a big problem to override. So, the possibility to expand these dashboards with efficiently integrated communicational cloud based services (cloudlets) represents a relevant added value as well as contributes to solving the interoperability problem. Following the architecture for integration of enriched existing cloud services, as instances of manufacturing resources, this paper: a) proposes a cloud based web platform to support dashboard integrating communicational services, and b) describe an experimentation to sustain the theory that the effective and efficient interoperability, especially in dynamic environments, could be achieved only with human intervention.
Top2. Interoperability And Ubiquity
Besides the on-demand self-service model, the reduction of costs, the improvement of accessibility, the multi-tenancy, and many others technological challenges that can be identified with cloud computing, its flexibility and reliable and scalable processing capacity in particular, made it a potential successful platform to promote the emergence of new business paradigm or opportunities, and to promote change existing business process (Group, 2010).
The Manufacturing, as a traditional business activity that requires timely and sufficient quantities of resources (material, machines, workers, etc.), that behaves under complex and “heavy” production process, has been changing and transforming in an efficient and dynamic activity, with agility to react to continuous change of market demand and with the capacity to be much more competitive. According to the literature, ubiquity represents existence and sufficient availability, anytime and anywhere, which can be seen on manufacturing as the capacity to produce sufficiently, knowing that the necessary resources exist.
The literature emphasizes too the (virtually technological) unlimited capacity (scalability, processing, etc.) achieved with Cloud Computing (Charlton, 2008) and the Ubiquitous Information Systems (UIS) that allow permanent services availability and use. To have systems that support a Cloud and Ubiquitous Manufacturing (CUMS), both properties must be present.
Ferreira et al. (2012) emphasized the potential of the cloud and systems that grant Ubiquity as relevant technological supporting “tools” to nowadays continuous business models changes.
The Cloud Manufacturing (see Figure 1) represents such recent transformation (Bo-hu et al., 2010) where multiple cloud models, mainly hybrid clouds and their Software as a Services (SaaS), sustain the needed ubiquity of resources (Foust, 1975).
Figure 1. Cloud manufacturing global architecture