Design, simulation and testing of a cloud platform for sharing digital fabrication resources for education

• Published in: Journal of cloud computing : advances, systems and applications Vol. 8; no. 1; pp. 1 - 22
• Main Authors: Cornetta, Gianluca, Mateos, Javier, Touhafi, Abdellah, Muntean, Gabriel-Miro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 19.08.2019; Springer Nature B.V; SpringerOpen
• Subjects: Cloud architectures; Cloud computing; Cloud information technologies in education; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Computer System Implementation; Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks; Fabrication as a service (FaaS); Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Internet; Internet of the things (IoT); Learning; Machine to machine communication; Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems; Special Purpose and Application-Based Systems; Technical education; Machine to machine communication; Cloud architectures; Internet of the things (IoT); Fabrication as a service (FaaS)
• ISSN: 2192-113X; 2192-113X
• DOI: 10.1186/s13677-019-0135-x

Cloud and IoT technologies have the potential to support applica- tions that are not strictly limited to technical fields. This paper shows how digital fabrication laboratories (Fab Labs) can leverage cloud technologies to enable resource sharing and provide remote access to distributed expensive fabrication resources over the internet. We call this new concept Fabrication as a Service (FaaS), since each resource is exposed to the internet as a web ser- vice through REST APIs. The cloud platform presented in this paper is part of the NEWTON Horizon 2020 technology-enhanced learning project. The NEWTON Fab Labs architecture is described in detail, from system concep- tion and simulation to system cloud deployment and testing in NEWTON project small and large-scale pilots for teaching and learning STEM subjects.