Mifta Ahmed Umer

1. Introduction The global manufacturing industry is gradually entering an era of highly competitive, personalized, and complex demands from customers, hyper-automation, and flexible and responsive solutions for developing dynamic capabilities to meet these demands [1,2,3]. In this new era, the information technology, systems, and communication (ITSC) infrastructure is closely integrated with the operations infrastructure of manufacturing organizations in Industry 4.0 [2].

1. Introduction Cloud manufacturing, as the name suggests, is a framework of operational planning, scheduling, monitoring, and control of manufacturing operations using hosted applications through cloud computing [1,2,3]. Traditional manufacturing systems were controlled by programmable logic controllers (PLCs) operated by the local on-plant computers, which could run manufacturing operations in limited physical spaces.