A cloud infrastructure for enabling provision of the Material Testing as a Service (MTaaS)

Centre for Precision Manufacturing, Department of DMEM, The University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom

^* Corresponding author: qin.yi@strath.ac.uk

Abstract

This paper focuses on a ‘cloud infrastructure’ (MTaaS) that has been developed to support and coordinate integrated services and supply chain management. This will enable the seamless operation of a dynamic and adaptive system providing customer-centred material testing services. The cloud system is designed not only for decision making regarding the evaluation of the situations brought by industry and translating them into upscaling, characterisation and service workflows, but also for promoting existing products, improving facility usage and providing expertise consultancy. The development of MTaaS involves specifying the cloud infrastructure requirement, defining the back-end and front-end system architecture and modules, and outlining the operation fields of each module along with associated terminology, parameters and contents. This includes handling material testing service registration, verification, marketing, composition, preparation, offering, processing, monitoring as well as customer inquiries, monitoring and feedback. These efforts make MTaaS integrate product, service and customer-related information into a single platform, encompassing necessary operation related data, customer related data, inventory data and supply chain data.