Ubiquitous computing and cloud computing (UC and CC) have become a ‘hit’ in just a couple of years, starting from information and communication technologies professionals, and rapidly spreading among professionals in other sectors (manifested through rapidly growing number of applications in companies and rapidly growing number of research papers by academia), and in particular in manufacturing, which is of our particular interest in this special issue. This big popularity of UC and CC is due in great part to their potential for the technological improvement of IT bases for companies but, virtually, even more to the ‘explosion’ of new UC- and CC-based businesses. The success of up-to-date applications and anticipations of new potential led to perceptions, by many authors, that UC and CC might revolutionise the way that businesses are done. However, the new ‘boost’ to research, development and adoption of UC and CC is just happening with wide promotion of ‘Industry 4.0’ paradigm. UC and CC could be considered as among the most important the technological bases and enablers for the Industry 4.0 paradigm development. Moreover, the organisational models of manufacturing companies, built over UC and CC, whether ‘monolithic’ or networked, could be considered as the Industry 4.0 models.
The use of UC and CC can be employed in, and for, enterprises, paradigmatically in two global modes: (1) using UC and/or CC as a company’s new computational resources – to be used in any of the Computer Integrated Manufacturing/digital factory/smart factory/(and similar) functions, improving or optimising them, that is, improving their performance through the new, more efficient, supporting computational resources, but preserving the actual organisational paradigm and (2) building enterprises as a homomorphism of the UC and/or CC, implying fundamental architectural, organisational and operational changes of the enterprises, that is, implying the new organisations’ intra- and inter-organisational paradigm, that enable the new organisations as the nonlinear, ‘flow’ organisations, capable to pass through the transformative changes. Curiously, when UC and CC are employed in accordance of the second mode (organisation as a homomorphism of UC and/or CC), the organisations do not have necessarily to use the UC and/or CC but could, and have to, do it to reach the highest level of performance by whatever criteria. In this case, the organisations could be, but not only, seen as a networked system, in principle a very large network, integrating hundreds to thousands and virtually to millions of ‘nodes’, with ‘extremely high capacity of changing the way of work and doing business’, for individuals, groups, communities or for companies, with high scalability, high slack, ‘not bounded to a predefined size’ and as a complex system. The organisations that employ UC and CC, in one or both paradigmatical modes of employment, will be called ubiquitous and cloud enterprise (for Manufacturing) (UbiCEM), or, for short, ubiquitous and cloud manufacturing (UCM).
In the literature, it is possible to find that authors, when define what is UbiCEM, or UCM, refer to the organisations in accordance to one of the two paradigmatical employment of the UC and CC concepts. It means that in the community there is not a ‘universally’ accepted definition of UbiCEM or UCM. Virtually, both types of definitions are right. And this is the case as well for the papers presented in this special issue. However, several features are common. These are large networks, manufacturing anywhere and anytime, servitisation of virtually all functions and scalability.
Concerning theoretical and practical developments of UbiCEM, or UCM, the topics to be addressed could be classified in several groups such as (1) UbiCEM/UCM description – addressing definitions, terminology, elements and objects, application areas and functional domains of manufacturing systems, such as design, planning, control, management, production, maintenance, quality, marketing and similar; (2) UbiCEM/UCM models and behaviour – referring to models and modelling of architectures, networks and network theory applications, service systems and services, dynamic reconfiguration and reconfigurability, dynamic process planning, production planning and scheduling, interoperability and similar; (3) UbiCEM/UCM mechanisms of choice – considering management of lean, agile, and chaordic UbiCEM/UCM, concurrent and collaborative UbiCEM, real-time manufacturing data and Big Data management and analytics in UbiCEM/UCM, scalability management, business models, transformation, or migration, from the ‘traditional’ to UbiCEM/UCM organisational paradigm and others; (4) UbiCEM/UCM methods and tools – referring employment as enablers cloud, ubiquitous and ‘calm’ technologies, Internet of things /Internet of manufacturing resources, cyber-physical systems, low-cost manufacturing resources, real-time traceability, visibility and decision support systems, virtuality and virtualisation, real-time communication and pragmatics supporting architectures, dashboards, brokering, meta-organisations and others; (5) UbiCEM/UCM epistemology and ontology – addressing knowledge acquisition, use and validity on UbiCEM/UCM, UbiCEM/UCM-based paradigm change and ‘mind-shift’, UbiCEM in social context and value, UbiCEM phenomenology and critique (e.g. limits and sense), roadmaps for UbiCEM science and technology development and implementation and others.
This special issue comprises 10 papers that present research results on a number of topics listed above.
The first paper Cloud manufacturing – a critical review of recent development and future trends, by Göran Adamson, Lihui Wang, Magnus Holm and Philip Moore, presents an up-to-date literature review together with identified outstanding research issues, and future trends and directions within cloud manufacturing (CM).
The second paper Ubiquitous manufacturing: overview, framework and further research directions, by Rameshwar Dubey, Angappa Gunasekaran and Anindya Chakrabarty, presents a conceptual framework for successful implementation of ubiquitous manufacturing (UM). The framework is synthesised over available UM literature by developing and classifying a contextual relationship among identified variables using an interpretive structural modelling (ISM) technique, and using cross-impact matrix multiplication (MICMAC) analysis, which synthesis, of the ISM model and MICMAC analysis, resulted in the framework. Due to the extensive literature analysis, this paper could be used as a review paper too besides the framework offered.
The next paper Decentralised network architecture for cloud manufacturing, by Gašper Škulj, Rok Vrabič, Peter Butala and Alojzij Sluga, in which the authors modelled CM as a decentralised network of ‘autonomous work systems’ (AWS) as service providers. The AWS network is modelled as the Watts–Strogatz small-world network. The authors investigated how the propagation about a service inquiry will be shared and how much time the propagation process will take in comparison to the network size, considering that the communication speed in the proposed architecture is critical for its functionality. It was shown that the created networks will take the form of small-world networks and that the time of propagation will increase much more slowly than the network size. Concerning the absolute it is shown that the service inquiry would be propagated through an AWS network with a few thousand nodes in a matter of seconds.
The fourth paper Organisational resilience in a cloud-based enterprise in a supply chain: a challenge for innovative SMEs, by Slavko Arsovski, Zora Arsovski, Miladin Stefanović, Danijela Tadić and Aleksandar Aleksić, contributes to the introduction of a model for assessment of organisational resilience potential in SMEs of the automotive industry in an uncertain environment when they are viewed as a cloud-based enterprise in a supply chain or as a non-cloud enterprise. In this research, the model of an organisation is presented as a network of business processes. Organisational resilience factors are assessed on the level of each business process and on the overall level of organisational resilience potential. The obtained results suggest that the cloud-based enterprises in a supply chain have ‘enhanced organisational resilience potential’ compared to the non-cloud enterprise.
The paper Resource service sharing in cloud manufacturing based on the Gale–Shapley algorithm: advantages and challenge, by Yongkui Liu, Lin Zhang, Fei Tao and Long Wang, presents a model of CM resource service (RS) sharing based on the Gale-Shapley algorithm. There is presented detailed theoretical and simulation analysis with regard to RS utilisation rate, needs satisfaction rate, total utilities of demanders and providers as well as their performance is conducted. The obtained results reveal the advantages of CM RS sharing in comparison with traditional networked manufacturing.
The sixth paper Research on cloud manufacturing service discovery based on latent semantic preference about OWL-S, by Hejun Jiao, Jing Zhang, Jun Huai Li and Jinfa Shi, addresses the method of service discovery about CM. The method is based on introduction of semantic elements into service discovery problem, using Ontology Web Language for Service (OWL-S) for service description, and an improved algorithm for semantic similarity measurement as well. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method are verified for the case of service requests for the shaft manufacturing requirements from a manufacturing company.
The paper Enabling a ubiquitous and cloud manufacturing foundation with field-level service-oriented architecture, by Jeff Morgan and Garret E. O’Donnell, focuses on a comparative review of field-level service-oriented architectures (SOA) and how these could enable ‘a foundation’ for UCM. The reviewed systems include the industrial standard Object Linking and Embedding for process control-unified architecture, the emergent universal factory floor communication protocol MTConnect, the National Instrument Shared Variable Engine and the data interoperability specification Device Profile for Web Services, in the context of SOA systems, modelling techniques and enterprise integration. The analysis showed that there is no one solution to meet the requirement of every manufacturing system or enterprise level, and that a hybrid architecture that enables data interoperability between networks is developed.
The eight paper Effective memory reusability based on user distributions in a cloud architecture to support manufacturing ubiquitous computing, by Ping-Yu Hsu, Su-Tzu Hsieh and Yu-Cheng Chuang, proposes an effective load-adjusted-profile-oriented allocation algorithm for enhancing memory reusability for cloud-based infrastructure and improving the performance of servers by balancing their workloads. In effect, the proposed algorithm can be used in the CC facility to enhance UC in the manufacturing environment by increasing of memory utilisation through an efficient user allocation mechanism. The algorithm is tested in a manufacturing company over real Enterprise Resource Planning data set and the results showed significantly better results when compared with the profile-oriented clustering algorithm which served as the benchmark, implying that companies, with the proposed algorithm, can deploy multiple low-cost hardware servers to implement the cloud solution.
The ninth paper User-centred cloud service adaptation: an adaptation framework for cloud services to enhance user experience, by Katerina Tzafilkou, Nicolaos Protogeros and Adamantios Koumpis, proposes a user-centred framework that addresses self-adaptation of cloud services based on users’ distinct needs and requirements. Users’ distinct needs and requirements, for the self-adaptation of cloud services, are identified through a collection of user-related data into the cloud, which later support the delivery of adaptive cloud services, contextually relevant to users’ tasks and to their behavioural profiles. A first prototype demonstration is also presented as a future platform.
The last, tenth paper A cloud based architecture with embedded pragmatics renderer for ubiquitous and cloud manufacturing, by Luís Ferreira, Goran Putnik, Maria Manuela Cruz-Cunha, Zlata Putnik, Hélio Castro, Catia Alves,Vaibhav Shah and Leonilde Varela, presents a multi-layer communicational architecture designated as the communicational architecture for providing effective interoperability of heterogeneous services in UCM. The architecture is characterised as (a) rich client interfaces with sufficient interaction to allow user agility and competence, (b) multimodal, for multiple client device classes support and (c) communicational to allow pragmatics, where human-to-human real interaction is completely supported. The main innovative part of the architecture is the pragmatic renderer, a pragmatics supporting engine that supports all pragmatics services, which represents an implementation of the ‘semiotic-based interoperability framework’ as an improvement of the ‘traditional’ transactional interoperability architectures.
In conclusion, it is expected that this special issue improves the ‘state-of-the-art’, at least to ‘open’ the research that would result in definitive adoption of UbiCEM/UCM. There is also a hope that this special issue on UbiCEM/UCM will deserve the manufacturing systems research community’s attention adequate to its great potential towards transformation of the actual manufacturing paradigm, just to refer again the Industry 4.0 paradigm, but also beyond it, enriching the social options for sustainable society.
Acknowledgements
First, our acknowledgements and greatest thanks go to Prof. Stephen Newman, Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing (IJCIM), and Dr Aydin Nassehi, Managing Editor, for their highest support and professionalism and, more importantly, their highest collaboration, understanding and patience during the development of this Special Issue. Next, our acknowledgements go to the authors, for their contributions and collaboration and especially to the authors who also served as reviewers, and other reviewers, for their great effort during the review process and for the suggestions they provided to the authors, without which this complex and challenging project would not have been made possible.