Cloud computing has been providing a new promising paradigm and changes the way of design and build of information systems and service provisions. With the more and more fierce competition in the global market, there are also increasing demands for individual manufacturing enterprises to collaborate with each other in a flexible, on demand, and selforganized way. As a new manufacturing model, cloud manufacturing is borrowed from the concept of cloud computing and integrates the key technologies of cloud computing, Internet of things, service computing and some others. In the cloud manufacturing environment, manufacturing resources are encapsulated as manufacturing services by using virtualization technology, and the resources and services are then provided to enterprises on demand. In this paper, the characteristics of cloud manufacturing model were briefly described, and the key technologies such as resource virtualization, resource integration, cloud manufacturing platform and trading technologies for cloud service were also discussed. Finally, the preliminary research results were introduced and several applications of cloud manufacturing were presented.
