Engineering Applications of the Cloud
Kincho H. Law, Jack C.P. Cheng, Renate Fruchter, Ram Duvvuru Sriram · 2016
Cloud computing, where services are delivered over a network, has the potential to transform the practice of engineering. With tools and services residing in the cloud environment, engineering and manufacturing companies can now have access to shared computing resources and advanced application services everywhere and anytime on an as-needed basis. This results in considerable cost savings in expenditure on information technology (IT) and enhances their ability to deliver high-quality engineered products. This chapter reviews cloud service models and discusses the approaches that cloud service providers use to deliver their application services. For cloud computing truly to deliver values to engineering enterprises, information and service interoperability and collaborative technologies are needed to support the entire engineering product life cycle. Two example applications are introduced to illustrate the potential deployment of cloud service environment for supporting information interoperability and collaborative design. The first example introduces the incorporation of engineering information models for product information sharing and exchange in the cloud environment. The second example describes deploying application services in the cloud environment to support virtual brainstorming and team engagement in collaborative engineering design.