Cybermanufacturing in the shared economy

The Advanced Manufacturing Program 2.0 envisages a rejuvenation of the manufacturing infrastructure in the USA. Many of the rejuvenated plants are not human-labor intensive; rather, these facilities have advanced capabilities that have automated machines with a few human operators. As such programs are rolled out to revitalize the economy, we will have many small facilities that are highly automated to execute specific tasks. However, when the market demands vary, it is very likely that the utilization of such advanced plants with limited, highly optimized, capabilities will decrease. To mitigate the losses that can arise from such idle resources, we are investigating a new framework in which such automated and optimized plants can be reused and shared across a rich variety of manufacturing applications. A cloud-hosted service offers a front end for manufacturing tasks to be submitted while it makes resource allocation and scheduling decisions across the geographically distributed plants.