Future Report: Cloud Computing in Mechanical Engineering Design

With more than 10 years of development, the centralized cloud computing model has become a standard IT service platform.

New technologies, new requirements, the explosion of IoT, and more real-time applications will fundamentally change the computing topology, and more and more enterprises, organizations, and research institutions will focus on cloud computing, as well as new computing and storage use cases - edge computing and fog computing. The location and distribution of these calculations and data stores plays a critical role in the well-being of IT applications and management.

Industry 4.0 opens up new industrial thinking in the Internet era, and the industrial Internet of Things has begun to appear as a concrete embodiment of Industry 4.0, and is increasingly being used in mechanical engineering design. Lenze pays special attention to this trend and publishes "Cloud Computing in Mechanical Engineering"

What is Cloud Computing?

As an IT concept, cloud computing provides resources such as processing power, storage, applications and data, as well as corresponding management and billing services, in real time over the Internet as needed. It's like opening a different water company in each different area, there is no geographical limit, when you need it, you don't care how the water comes from, how the electricity is generated, twist the faucet to use water, plug in the electricity, and only need to worry about paying the water and electricity bills! If necessary, you can also buy a private pool.

What are the specific forms of cloud services?

There are many types of clouds, regardless of whether they are private clouds, public clouds, or hybrid clouds, there is no superiority or inferiority, the key is whether they match the needs.

Deploying a dedicated pool of resources on top of an existing IT infrastructure within an enterprise is known as a private cloud. This is more suitable for businesses with high requirements for security, control, bandwidth, and availability.

Public clouds provide standardized SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services based on carriers' data centers in multiple locations or even around the world, and are used by many other customers at the same time. This model enables businesses to use these resources with a low initial investment and provides virtually unlimited resource scalability.

Hybrid cloud is not strictly a form of cloud, but rather a deployment model. For example, enterprises can leverage these clouds to perform applications and processes related to data protection in private clouds and run other services in public clouds.

Why is cloud computing suddenly popular in industry?

In the era of Industry 4.0, digitalization and networked manufacturing have fundamentally changed the mode of production, resulting in a significant increase in productivity, and it is necessary for industrial enterprises to consolidate computing power in the context of large-scale use of smart devices. However, at present, the IT structure of enterprises is slowly approaching the limits of its capabilities.

The computing power provided by cloud computing is a breakthrough for enterprises to break through the bottleneck of IT structure in the future, coupled with factors such as the decline in data transmission prices, the increase in bandwidth, the reduction of sensor prices, and the digitalization and networking of production facilities, etc., have laid the foundation for the digital transformation of various industries in Germany, and all areas of the industrial manufacturing industry have ushered in opportunities for new business models.

Edge computing or fog computing use cases

Depending on the type of equipment, workshop, or production process, the amount of data involved can be enormous. Sending all this data to the cloud requires high bandwidth and proper processing resources.

If only a portion of the data is needed – such as averages measured over a defined period of time or just outliers – it is worth consolidating and analysing data about equipment or shop floors (edge computing), or data from the intranet to the Internet (fog computing).

Therefore, it is generally recommended to select a combination of cloud, fog, and edge computing accordingly after a needs analysis of which standards are required for data transmission, storage, and processing.

What are the forms of cloud services?

Cloud services themselves can come in many forms. The use of X to refer to a service (XaaS, "any service") has become an accepted way of describing it – e.g., IaaS, PaaS, SaaS [7]. To quote the Pizza theory circulating on the Internet: from the procurement of raw materials to the production, to the table setting, they all do it themselves, which is equivalent to local deployment. When considering an easier path, we have three more options:

The first option is to buy the finished product and do it at home.

Unlike doing it at home, you'll need a pizza supplier. The finished product is the underlying cloud that provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

The second option: order takeout, and the pizza will be delivered to your doorstep.

By providing users with a platform that can be run immediately, cloud providers enable users to work in software development environments such as SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft, develop their own applications, and also extend and execute purchased applications.

The third option: go straight to the pizza shop and eat without preparing anything.

Dine-in is software-as-a-service (SaaS), which refers to applications from cloud providers that can be used through an interface or a web browser. Customers cannot influence the management or operation of the cloud infrastructure, and generally do not affect the delivery of applications.

Now, software developers are increasingly using function-as-a-service (FaaS) offerings from the world of serverless computing so that they can run individual parts of the code (functionality) directly without having to set up containers or virtual servers for this purpose, saving IaaS resources and reducing the cost of cloud usage.

Future Report: Cloud Computing in Mechanical Engineering Design

Regardless of where the shop floor is located, via an on-site IT connection or a remote connection via the Internet, machine builders and operators need access to information about shop floor failures, unplanned downtime, capacity utilization, and current production data.

Edge computers can be used as gateways to establish connectivity to the cloud or communication connections can be integrated directly into the device, in both cases you must ensure that you have sufficient resources to bridge the communication interruption to provide temporary buffering for the data, and that the connection is automatically re-established. Whereas, the establishment of communication protocols and connections is cloud-specific.

In the future, it will be important for machine builders to include equipment suppliers in their machines that not only interface to cloud systems, but also provide customized cloud services and data for the equipment. This will eliminate the need for machine builders to model devices in the cloud and integrate applications.

Cloud computing has now become

Part of the mechanical engineering design industry!

The digitalization and networking of production is essential to lay the foundation for Industry 4.0. The cloud isn't just a tool in this process – it's going to transform relationships with upstream suppliers, buyers, and customers. Therefore, only cloud computing can open the door to the next stage of development – that is, to build data-based services. They provide added value for the optimization of business and production processes, and often provide a return on investment in a short period of time.

In the white paper "Cloud Computing in Mechanical Engineering", Lenze, the world's leading supplier of drive and automation systems, delves into the application of cloud computing in mechanical engineering design to obtain the appropriate equipment data in real time to drive better decision-making and even control industrial processes. The release of this white paper not only represents the initial achievements of cloud computing in the field of mechanical engineering design, but also indicates that equipment manufacturers and equipment operators may become a new blue ocean in the cloud service market.

Future Report: Cloud Computing in Mechanical Engineering Design

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