Scheduling of Smart Factories using Edge Computing and Clouds

Reconfiguration-as-a-Service is an emerging trend for dynamic smart factories. This approach exploits cloud-based services to continuously optimise the performance of manufacturing systems. The edge computing paradigm, on the contrary, aims at performing the whole computation at the edge of the network, close to the data sources. In this paper, a trade-off between these two possibilities is analysed. A value-based criterion is proposed for executing optimisation engine either in a cloud or at the edge. Experimental results determine the ranges for both the cloud computation cost and the edge computer's speed in which manufacturing scheduling leads to higher profits.