Methods and systems that provide cloud-based physical infrastructure

Abstract

The current document is directed to methods and systems that migrate traditional control systems used to manage and administer physical infrastructure, including retail establishments, warehouses, manufacturing facilities, offices, hospitals and medical clinics, and other physical infrastructure, to cloud-computing facilities. The approach to controlling physical infrastructure disclosed in the current document is not simply an extension of traditional control systems to access and use cloud-computing facilities, but instead represents the migration of physical infrastructure into cloud-computing facilities, resulting in elimination of the need for local computers and computer-implemented control systems from the physical infrastructure and a complete abstraction and virtualization of the hardware systems within the physical infrastructure. In the currently disclosed approach, complex management logic, including policy-based and rules-based management logic as well as programmed management logic, is fully migrated from physical infrastructure to cloud-computing facilities, providing greater reliability, independence from physical infrastructure systems and components, and a centralized cloud-resident infrastructure model that can be accessed and manipulated, in cloud-computing facilities, by a wide variety of different types of applications, including management applications, visualization applications, inventory-controlled applications, and security applications. This approach provides far greater freedom in design and implementation of both control systems as well as physical hardware systems, greatly accelerates the rates at which control systems and physical hardware systems can be improved, and also provides a conceptual-framework basis for rapid technological evolution of physical-infrastructure control systems.