Enabling Collaboration in Virtual Manufacturing Enterprises with Cloud Computing

In our globalized world, in particular Small and Medium Enterprises of the manufacturing domain face serious challenges, such as constantly shorter product life cycles and strong competition with companies from low-cost countries. To remain competitive in this environment, efficient collaboration with partner enterprises is a necessity. Virtual Manufacturing Enterprises are a viable means to realize such collaboration, but usually require expert knowledge for developing and maintaining a suitable infrastructure for all partners. In this paper, we present a generic Information Technology (IT) architecture for realizing Virtual Manufacturing Enterprises. Further, we show how cloud computing can be employed and integrated to enable efficient data provisioning as basic building block for collaboration in Virtual Manufacturing Enterprises. With the proposed architecture and technologies, Small and Medium Enterprises are capable to easily form Virtual Manufacturing Enterprises, and hence, are enabled to quickly react to changing market requirements and increase their competiveness.