Cloud-based design and manufacturing: a network perspective

The motivation of this research is the need for reducing time and cost associated with maintaining information and communication technology infrastructure for design and manufacturing in digitally networked environments, enhancing design communication and collaboration in distributed and collaborative design processes, and adapting to rapidly changing market demands. The objective of this dissertation is to propose a new design and manufacturing paradigm, namely, Cloud-Based Design and Manufacturing (CBDM), for enhancing collaborative product development in distributed settings. In this dissertation, the following challenges pertaining to CBDM are addressed: the systematic development of a conceptual framework and a holistic vision for CBDM systems; the development of a new approach for visualizing distributed and collaborative design processes, measuring tie strengths in a complex and large design collaboration network, and detecting design communities with common design activities in cloud-based design (CBD) settings from a social network perspective; and the development of a new approach that helps identify potential manufacturing bottlenecks and scale manufacturing capacity in cloud-based manufacturing (CBM) settings from a manufacturing network perspective. The contributions of this dissertation are categorized in three research domains: (1) proposing the first definition, a holistic vision, and an example of application scenario for CBDM, (2) modeling and analyzing information flow in cloud-based design for improving design collaboration, and (3) modeling and analyzing material flow in cloud-based manufacturing for planning manufacturing scalability.Ph.D