About the CREMA project

Outline

Due to the proliferation of ICT Technologies, manufacturing industry is undergoing substantial transformation not only in terms of hardware but also in terms of Cyber-Physical Production Systems and the software and services used within production environments.

In parallel, the manufacturing processes of the future are changing and need to be highly flexible and dynamic in order to satisfy customer demands for, e.g., large series production, mass customization, or changing orders. In order to keep pace with the needs of the manufacturing industry of the future, in Manufacturing 4.0 companies need to flexibly react to these demands and be able to offer production capacities in a rapid way. Thus companies looking for manufacturing capacity need to be supported by the means to find these capacities, configure them, and integrate them into their own manufacturing processes. To achieve this, one obvious approach is to port successful concepts from the field of Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) and Cloud computing to manufacturing to mirror agile collaboration through flexible and scalable manufacturing processes:

1. Leasing and releasing manufacturing assets in an on-demand, utility-like fashion
2. Rapid elasticity through scaling leased assets up and down if necessary, and
3. Pay-per-use through metered service

Applying these principles, Cloud manufacturing can move manufacturing processes from production-oriented to service-oriented networks by modelling single manufacturing assets as services in a similar way as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. By modelling all process steps and manufacturing assets as services it is possible to realize cross-organization manufacturing orchestrations and integrate distributed resources and ultimately manufacture products more efficiently. While the theoretical foundations for Cloud manufacturing are manifest there are no proven tools and technologies exist in the market - CREMA aims to change this fact by providing Cloud-based Rapid Elastic Manufacturing based on the XaaS and Cloud model making use of intelligent service coordination by innovative use of AI and semantic technologies.