Open and collaborative product design and production in IoT-enabled manufacturing cloud

Customized/personalized products are gaining more shares in today's product market. Such products need collective efforts from consumers, manufacturers and third parties. On the other side, the Internet of Things (IoT) with pervasive sensing/actuating/networking ability greatly facilitates remote operation of manufacturing activities and efficient collaboration among stakeholders. This provides great opportunities to the above demand. Thus we propose a full-connection model of product lifecycle in the IoT-enabled cloud manufacturing environment. The model uses social networks to connect multiple parties and facilitate open innovations, IoT to glue physical space to cyber space and cloud manufacturing to provide various elastic services, so that the on-demand workspace, interaction, information sharing or collective problem solving are enabled. We also propose a supporting infrastructure for this model using the latest information and communication technologies. Finally, we present a RFID (Radio-frequency identification) enabled production system for customized/personalized products with the ability to enable a new paradigm of “dynamic processes and close collaborations among different roles” and secure robust production.