Towards a Cloud-based Platform for Enabling Supply Chain Collaboration

The advances on information and communication technologies (ICT) allow the
development of collaboration tools, which exchange different types of data in order to optimize certain functionality. Distributed and large-scale systems (e.g. supply chains) have incorporated many systems and new technologies that are compatible with collaboration tools for optimizing processes. However, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) have not yet implemented the access to such tools due to their limited resources. More and more SMEs are opting for an on demand service model based on the cloud computing paradigm to transform their fixed costs of infrastructure investment into variable costs. This change in the economic model is having an important impact on the companies’ cost of accessing technology. In this scope, the on-going European project Cloud Collaborative Manufacturing Networks (C2NET) proposes a cloud-based platform (CPL) to provide a scalable real-time architecture, platform and software that support the supply network optimisation of manufacturing and logistic assets based on collaborative demand, production and delivery plans. This paper presents the C2NET High Level Architecture (HLA) describing its main layers and components.