
Concept of CloudFlow
CloudFlow will establish a Competence Center from the very beginning to call for Application Experiments , to handle proposals by the CAD/CAM, CAE, Systems and PLM community and their execution on the CloudFlow infrastructure. There will be three waves of experiments, the first wave starting in the first phase of the project with experiments from the core partners. The second and third waves will be open to the community and will call for increasingly complex and challenging use cases, especially on engineering and manufacturing services and workflows.
Missing established Business Models are a main hampering factor for SW vendors not to provide Cloud services in public clouds in engineering and manufacturing. CloudFlow has one work package dedicated to the development and evaluation of business models where the involved SW vendors and consultancy company discuss, design and try different concepts to balance attractiveness and economics of accounting for service provision.
Concerns about Security on the user’s side in engineering and manufacturing hinders acceptance of compute services in public clouds. This holds true almost independent from internet security standards. The remaining risk is considered undetermined. As many of our discussions show a security label from an independent organization would bring acceptance a big step forward. CloudFlow will work together with appropriate organizations (e.g. SQS Company) on trusted services and to establish a quality label for secure cloud computational and data management services.
In addition to the open calls for application experiments, community involvement will be achieved through Outreach and Standardization activities. Outreach covers dissemination and exploitation activities and the link between CloudFlow and the I4MS initiative with which CloudFlow will cooperate. Moreover, a transformation of CloudFlow into an international Manufacturing Technology Platform project (CloudFlow-IMS) as part of the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) will be considered. Dissemination at user conferences, scientific conferences and fairs complement the above activities. The inclusion of CloudFlow results into the commercial products of the involved software vendors (all being SMEs) will contribute to the Exploitation of the project results.
Success Stories Of CloudFlow
The application experiments are examples of innovative use cases in product and process development/simulation. The use cases have been selected based on their high potential to benefit from Cloud technology for easier and more affordable access to complex computational engineering services and workflows. CloudFlow has especially focused on use cases addressing stages in the virtual product development of mechatronic systems, such as design, simulation, optimization, visualization and covering workflows along the value chain in and across companies. Another innovative field for use cases in CloudFlow is simulation of manufacturing processes/tools. The use cases are mostly driven by the end user, a manufacturing company which is preferably an SME.
Key Highlights:
The success stories are giving an overview about the economic and technical impacts the different application experiments reached during project duration of one year. Here we are highlighting some of the most impressive impacts for the participating companies and their products:
- reducing development time from 3-5 months to 1-2 months.
- reduced fan power consumption from 4 kWel to 2.75 kWel (> 30 percent).
- clients will save electricity cost that amounts to about 350,000 euros per year.
- potential for massive savings on natural resources in the production of MEMS sensors.
- huge number of variants in a very short calculation time.
- increase of the sold Cloud-based licences by 5-10 percent (about 150,000 euros in three-year perspective).
- Only for the Cloud computing, one company is expecting to offer between 2 and 5 new job positions.

Felix Schneider
Author at Cloud Flow
Felix Schneider produces technical content with a focus on cloud-based infrastructure in the iGaming industry.

Lukas Hartmann
Editor at Cloud Flow
Lukas Hartmann is responsible for the development of data-driven solutions in the iGaming sector.