ICIF: an inter-cloud interoperability framework for computing resource cloud providers in factories of the future

Factories of the future (FoF) is a relatively new topic focusing on developing competitive manufacturing. Exploiting cloud services is a vital area for FoF. The collaboration between different cloud vendors can provide better quality of service at a lower price. This paper discusses a framework which supports inter-cloud interoperability in a heterogeneous computing resource cloud environment with the goal of dispatching the workload to the most effective clouds available at runtime. Moreover, a genetic algorithm (GA)–based job-scheduler is proposed as a part of the interoperability framework offering workload migration with the best performance at the least cost. The resource selection model is evaluated using agent-based simulation approach.