Development of Auto-scaling Cloud Manufacturing Framework for machine tool industry

In this paper, we design an Auto-scaling Cloud Manufacturing Framework (ACMF), aimed at providing a rapid development paradigm of how to build cloud manufacturing systems for the machine tool industry. First, a worker controller (WCR) is designed to automatically adjust the number of virtual machines according to demands for supporting multiple users to simultaneously access the cloud services using just enough computing resource. Second, a bulletin board-based exchange (BBX) protocol is designed to exchange data through shared cloud storages for reducing the burdens of developing manufacturing system. Further, we develop an Ontology inference cloud service (OICS) as an example of cloud manufacturing system. Two core functional modules, the Ontology inference module and the VMT (Virtual Machine Tool) module, are developed in the OICS for recommending suitable machine tools or cutting tools and performing VMT simulations, respectively. Finally, we deploy the OICS to a public cloud, namely Windows Azure, and apply the OICS to a machine tool factory for conducting integrated tests. Testing results show that the OICS can successfully recommend suitable machine tools or cutting tools for machining tasks, validating its efficacy of acting as a cloud manufacturing service.