Cloud-Enabled Product Design Selection and Manufacturing as a Service

Cloud services offer a cost-effective and reliable solution for many home and industrial applications. E-commerce is one of its first and most known applications. Product design selection is many times performed as part of the e-commerce process. Logistics services, as part of the e-commerce or as standalone applications, are offered through cloud-enabled solutions, as well. In addition, manufacturing applications also use several of the available types of cloud services for planning and control purposes. Manufacturing digital twin for production monitoring is arguably the most known cloud services architecture that was proposed in the recent years. Manufacturing as a service is used as another term for servitization of manufacturing operations using service-oriented architectures. Artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques are generally considered for control data processing, including big data processing and data analytics, and for planning purposes to improve/predict solutions when events or conditions change. There are also applications that use machine learning and artificial intelligence for small product design selection. This work combines all the above technologies, applications, services, and processes to define a product design selection and manufacturing as a service cloud-based system that brings customers, manufacturers, and other service providers on a common smart cloud platform. On one end of the process, customers start with selecting a preferred design with the aid of artificial intelligence-based solutions, and at the other end of the process they receive the product by means of smart logistics services.