A review of the application of grid technology in manufacturing

Abstract Grid technology has been recognised as a promising paradigm for the next generation manufacturing systems. Researchers have attempted to apply grid technology to product design, manufacturing resource integration and sharing, enterprise management, enterprise collaboration, resource optimal allocation and scheduling, and to enable the digitalisation of enterprise information as an implementation methodology. It has been already close to a decade since the first appearance of the concept of manufacturing grid (MGrid). Many projects on the application of grid technologies in manufacturing have been carried out, and a large number of research papers on MGrid have been published. In order for MGrid to be better known and accepted by researchers in the manufacturing community, this study aims to describe the connotation of MGrid through investigating existing research studies on MGrid. The contributions of this study are: (1) highlighting the motivations and driving forces of MGrid; (2) detailed description of the connotation of MGrid, such as the concept of MGrid; (3) presenting the key research contents and technologies of MGrid, including its four commonly known categories and 31 items; (4) investigating and summarising existing research on MGrid theories and applications; and (5) projecting several key future research issues of MGrid. Keywords: manufacturing grid (MGrid)networked manufacturingMGrid tools Acknowledgements This work is supported in part by National High-Tech R&D Program for CIMS (No. 2007AA04E153), the key project of National Programs for Fundamental R&D (No. 2007CB310900) in China, and the NSFC (National Science Foundation of China) proposal: research on modelling and dynamic characteristics of manufacturing resource service composition network based on scale-free model. The first author would like to express his great appreciation to the Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Fund of Wuhan University of Technology (WHUT) and Hubei Digital Manufacturing Key Lab for supporting his previous research work on manufacturing grid: research on resource and service search and optimal-selection theories and experiments in manufacturing systems (No. SZ0621). This paper is also supported in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in China. We would also like to express our appreciation for the valuable comments made by the four anonymous reviewers and the editor of IJPR.