Cloud Machining Community: A Method to Use Socialized Production Resources for Outsourcing Machining Processes and Parts

As outsourcing demands related to machining task are appearing to be increasingly explosive in recent years, especially in small and medium size manufacturing enterprises, a new production and operation phenomenon characterized by outsourcing machining services has emerged consequently. But the distributed machining resources (MRs) in the society limit the execution of these outsourced tasks. Under this circumstance, a Cloud Machining Community (CMC) is proposed in this chapter mainly focusing on outsourced tasks related to machining processes and parts. Furthermore, it could integrate the distributed socialized MRs and provide customers with on-demand machining services to fulfill all the outsourced tasks. The comprehensive framework and operation mode are established firstly, and roles classification in CMC is also talked about. Then, three key enabling technologies are put forward and analyzed in detail, namely virtual access of socialized machining resources, broadcasting and contracting of outsourcing tasks, and machining process monitoring towards a specific outsourcing task. A simple use case fashioning a torque arm of an airplane undercarriage is studied so as to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the proposed framework and technologies. Finally, some conclusions are drawn at the end of this article.