Secure and Resilient Manufacturing Operations Inspired by Software-Defined Networking

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a relatively new concept in the cloud and computer networks domain proposed as a solution to depart from the current limitations of traditional IP networks which are complex and, many times, difficult to manage. Manufacturing operations, being them originated on a single shop-floor or distributed across many organizations, have long now been subject to limitations in performance due to the manufacturing control software. This paper investigates the SDN concept adoption for the manufacturing product design and operational flow, by promoting the logical-only centralization of the shop-floor operations control within the manufacturing shared-cloud for clusters of manufacturing networks. First, the paper proposes the adoption of SDN concept to distributed manufacturing networks, with the goal to improve the performance of manufacturing data network metrics. Then, the paper proposes the design of an SDN-inspired mechanism for manufacturing control, with the goal to optimize the performance of specific manufacturing operations metrics such as total completion time, maximum lateness, and others. Both solutions are expected to bring manufacturing operations similar benefits that SDN is reported to generate to IP-based networks.