Shop-floor resource virtualization layer with private cloud support

Large scale emergence of mature cloud solutions, ranging from software-as-a-service based solutions for business management, to very sophisticate private cloud solutions; offer the building blocks for constructing extremely flexible enterprise systems that can respond to environmental changes with great agility. manufacturing enterprises need to adopt these new technologies to advance in a new era of mass customization where flexibility, scalability and agility are the differentiating factors. in this context, this paper introduces the virtualized mes and shop floor architecture as an intermediate layer in the manufacturing stack and discusses the advantages offered by this approach for manufacturing enterprises. a classification of mes and shop floor devices is presented focusing on the virtualization techniques suitable for each device type, considering the level of distributed intelligence and the virtualization overhead. shop floor virtualization through shop floor profiles is presented and discussed underlying the flexibility of the solution. a pilot multi-agent implementation for virtual shop floor configuration based on the cobasa reference architecture is presented and discussed. the shop floor profiles which define the virtual layout and mappings of the robotized manufacturing system are also provided in this context. the pilot implementation using six adapt robots and a ibm cloudburst 2.1 private cloud, is described and virtualization overhead in terms of event propagation delays is measured and presented in several scenarios of resource workload collocation on physical cloud blades