Professor Xun Xu is a Chair of Manufacturing at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Auckland. He joined the Department after completing a PhD from the University of Manchester (then UMIST), UK in 1996. He has been working in the field of intelligent manufacturing solutions for some 30 years. Dr. Xu is an internationally recognized expert in smart machining systems, cloud-based manufacturing and IoT enabled manufacturing. He serves as an Associate Editor and a member of Editorial Boards of a number of international journals and has published over 300 research papers. Dr. Xu is the founding Director of the University of Auckland “Innovative Manufacturing and Materials” Program, which draws expertise and experts from the Faculties of Engineering, Business and Science of the University. He has also served as the Associate Dean Research of the Faculty of Engineering, and Deputy Head of Department. He is the Director of Laboratory for Industry 4.0 Smart Manufacturing Systems (LISMS), the only Laboratory for Industry 4.0 in New Zealand. His current research focus is around the Industry 4.0 technologies, e.g. cloud manufacturing, smart factories, Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) for manufacturing, big industrial data and data analytics, additive manufacturing and human-machine interactions. Dr. Xu is the Fellow of American Society for Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the Fellow of Engineering New Zealand (EngNZ).

Cloud computing is changing the way industries and enterprises do their businesses in that dynamically scalable and virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Cloud Computing is also emerging as one of the major enablers for the manufacturing industry. It does so by helping businesses align product innovation with their business strategies, and creating intelligent factory networks that encourage effective collaborations.

There are two types of Cloud Computing adoptions in the manufacturing sector, manufacturing with direct adoption of Cloud Computing technologies and Cloud Manufacturing – the manufacturing version of Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing has been implemented in some of key areas of manufacturing such as IT and pay-as-you-go business models. In Cloud Manufacturing, distributed resources are encapsulated into cloud services and managed in a centralized and federated way. Clients can utilize cloud services according to their requirements. More significantly, Cloud Manufacturing transforms the traditional, production-oriented manufacturing business model to a service-oriented business model, which defines a “new game” for the manufacturers to play in the new era.