Process Simulation for Machine Reservation in Cloud Manufacturing

Abstract

Cloud manufacturing supports companies to create cross-organizational elastic process landscapes with flexible and scalable processes. In recent years, the Business Process Model and Notation language gained interest in the cloud manufacturing domain not only as a modeling language but also as a base for process enactment. During this enactment of manufacturing processes, accurate knowledge about when a machine is needed is of great importance. While such planning is simple in a static production environment, it becomes a challenging task in an elastic cloud manufacturing environment with a variety of flexible and scalable processes. Hence, we propose an approach that performs enactment simulations before an actual manufacturing process is carried out. The goal is to reserve manufacturing machines at the time at which they will be needed in a machine reservation timetable. By discussing different use case scenarios, we further elaborate on the benefits of our approach.