Manufacturing Process Simulation in a Hybrid Cloud Setup

Model-based design of manufacturing robotic systems involving the usage of different tools, models and the co-simulation of the system behaviour benefits from collaborative platforms enabling ready-to-use and cloud-hosted tools and models. Nonetheless, due to market segmentation and the difficulty to deploy and support all the existing tools and models in such a platform, it is, therefore, reasonable to consider a hybrid cloud-setup where some tools run in the public cloud and other are only available in private clouds or dedicated machines behind the walls of the licensed institution. In this paper, we report on a experiment of such scenario, where a Matlab/SimulinkTM, LS-Dyna, and Model.CONNECTTM powered co-simulation tool suite running in a private cloud is combined with the DDD Simulation tool running inside a public cloud. Due to this setup it was possible to combine a 1D hot stamping process simulation with a 3D visualisation. Finally the results of the process simulation were improved by considering realistic movement of the robot. Our study elicited several limitations and feature requests that need to be addressed to better support a hybrid cloud setup for model-based design practitioners. We expect this initial contribution to trigger ground breaking research encompassing all the community members interested in hybrid co-simulation setups.