From Computer Integrated Manufacturing to Cloud Manufacturing

Abstract

Until not much time ago, Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) was considered as a key philosophy to increase the capability and quality of production, increase the ability to produce according to the diverse customer requirements, as well as decrease of delivery times, while retaining the revenues in a highly competitive global market. However, in the last two decades, the CIM philosophy has lost importance. With the advent of communications and application developments to promote the interaction of different actors in manufacturing enterprises, other philosophies have emerged. One of them is Cloud Manufacturing (CM) that is supported by the latest advances in communications, computing and applications developments. According to Wu et al. (2013) CM is "a customer-centric manufacturing model that exploits on-demand access to a shared collection of diversified and distributed manufacturing resources to form temporary, reconfigurable production lines which enhance efficiency, reduce product lifecycle costs, and allow for optimal resource loading in response to variable-demand customer generated tasking". This paper analyses similarities and differences between the concepts of CIM and CM. In addition, the work shows the current state of the concepts and their potential and limitations for the future.