A Smart Manufacturing Service System Based on Edge Computing, Fog Computing, and Cloud Computing

The state-of-the-art technologies in new generation information technologies (New IT) greatly stimulate the development of smart manufacturing. In a smart manufacturing environment, more and more devices would be connected to the Internet so that a large volume of data can be obtained during all phases of the product lifecycle. Cloud-based smart manufacturing paradigm facilitates a new variety of applications and services to analyze a large volume of data and enable large-scale manufacturing collaboration. However, different factors, such as the network unavailability, overfull bandwidth, and latency time, restrict its availability for high-speed and low-latency real-time applications. Fog computing and edge computing extended the compute, storage, and networking capabilities of the cloud to the edge, which will respond to the above-mentioned issues. Based on cloud computing, fog computing, and edge computing, in this paper, a hierarchy reference architecture is introduced for smart manufacturing. The architecture is expected to be applied in the digital twin shop floor, which opens a bright perspective of new applications within the field of manufacturing.