Resource Utilization in Cloud Manufacturing - An Energy Perspective

Living a “low-carbon” life has been widely recognized and is gradually adopted by the public. Such a trend becomes one of the main drivers for manufacturing innovations. Meanwhile, to meet the emerging requirements, such as providing highly customized product, building flexible and collaborative production, cloud manufacturing is proposed in recent years. A close examination of its environmental benefits is needed. In this paper, resource utilization is focused. In the architecture of cloud manufacturing, energy consumption is analyzed and re-evaluated systematically, including energy characteristics, added energy segments and required functions. Three key merits are identified, better resource integration and optimization, higher resource utility rate, and facilitated knowledge sharing mechanism. However, these improvements can be cancelled in an energy-unattended cloud manufacturing system, for example, ignorance of energy data or inadequate energy models. A framework is then designed for performing energy analysis in a cloud environment. Conclusions are given at the end.