WiP Abstract: Cybermanufacturing in the Shared Economy

The Advanced Manufacturing Program 2.0 envisages a rejuvenationof the manufacturing infrastructure in the USA. Many of therejuvenated plants are not human-labor intensive; rather, thesefacilities have advanced capabilities that have automated machineswith a few human operators. As such programs are rolled outto revitalize the economy, we will have many small facilities thatare highly automated to execute specific tasks. However, whenthe market demands vary, it is very likely that the utilization ofsuch advanced plants with limited, highly optimized, capabilitieswill decrease. To mitigate the losses that can arise from such idleresources, we are investigating a new framework in which suchautomated and optimized plants can be reused and shared across arich variety of manufacturing applications. A cloud-hosted serviceoffers a front end for manufacturing tasks to be submitted whileit makes resource allocation and scheduling decisions across thegeographically distributed plants.