NIST Workshop on Open Cloud Architectures for Smart Manufacturing

This workshop is an initial event for manufacturers and providers of IoT technologies, cloud platforms, and services to share their visions, and identify and prioritize barriers, forming a basis for focused follow-on events.

Objectives:

To collect information and publish a report, including:

• Needs and potential impacts for manufacturing companies;
• Current and planned offerings of cloud, services, and IoT providers;
• Strategic and high-level cloud architectural approaches to match needs with offerings;
• Needs, gaps, and opportunities for integration technologies and standard.

Background:

Right now, Cloud Computing (CC) is a little like the Old West. Somewhat controlled chaos. This is certainly the situation that manufacturing industries are finding themselves when taking advantage of Mobile Computing, Data Analytics, IoT, and other advanced capabilities. Manufacturers are increasingly relying on eco-systems of information-based services, enabled by Cloud Computing, to manage and control their factories and supply chains. These services used to be provided only by software vendors with monolithic, and oftentimes massive, software applications. No longer. Many organizations are developing services to solve some of the management and control problems, but no single organization can solve all of those problems.

Using CC now requires manufacturers to mix and match such services and to find just the right mix for their specific problems. Fair to say, the ability to do this is becoming more difficult every day. That ability is hampered further, because these services are now being provided by multiple CC platforms. Clearly, there is a need for service vendors, cloud vendors, and manufacturers to work collaboratively to develop products that are more integrateable, more interoperable, and more composable than they are now. At least then, we can minimize the chaos.

OAGi and NIST are holding a workshop to bring these three groups together. And, to get them talking about best approaches, from their individual perspectives, to address these three goals. To provide a forum for this exchange, we will be asking participants to answer a number of important questions that help identify business needs, technical gaps, integration technologies, and interface standards. We will also provide opportunities for service and cloud providers to demonstrate their current and future plans for products. Manufacturers can see these products and provide valuable feedback.

The results from the workshop will be published in a document to be used in follow-on planning activities.

Why Attend:

Service providers, cloud providers, and manufactures have much to gain:

• Cloud Computing enables dynamic, scalable, and automated provisioning of computing resources in the pay-as-you-go business model, which also includes low overhead and operating costs.
• Service providers can have ubiquitous access to computing resources at a low up-front cost.
• Manufacturing enterprises can get a low-entry cost of computing resources and rich functionalities based on solutions that are composed from products from a number of vendors.

But, it only works for everybody if everybody works together. That involves more effective and efficient integration approaches, standards for interoperability, and composability of vendor solutions.