Software-defined Cloud Manufacturing with Edge Computing for Industry 4.0

Industrial trends and new generation information and communication technologies have become driving forces for advancement in the process control and manufacturing industry. This paper thoroughly investigates the future industrial trends from the perspectives of market, engineering system, product, innovation, etc., then incorporates the concept of software defined networking and proposes a new cloud based manufacturing model, Software Defined Cloud Manufacturing (SDCM). The key characteristics, reference architecture and emerging enabling technologies of SDCM are presented to support the SDCM's advantages in terms of real-time response, reconfiguration and operations of the manufacturing system. Resource virtualization and function programmability lie at the core of SDCM to empower the manufacturing sector. The paper is concluded with remarks and future work.