Challenges in Adopting Cloud Computing for Automation Process Controller in Manufacturing

Abstract

Today, due to delivering virtual computing services that does not require end user’s knowledge on physical implementation, location and complication of system configuration made cloud computing become one of the biggest buzzwords in the IT industry. With the benefit in scalability and elasticity from the cloud, many companies have started to invest for clouding some of their business applications. Amazon.com, Google, and eBay are some of the obvious examples of cloud services that emerged in the Internet era. For these reasons, the cloud computing has become a significant vision improvement for the automation in manufacturing computing industry. However, the challenges in cloud computing prevail as cloud grows in large scale in order to support huge numbers of high-performance process controllers; operating concurrently in manufacturing with zero downtime and no slowness, these challenges are impacting the decision to adopt cloud computing for process controller in manufacturing. This paper strives to look into every challenge in cloud computing to use for process controller from various angles, with the methodology of “cloud grid” to resolve key variables identified.