Collaborative service-component integration in cloud manufacturing

Abstract

The Industrial Internet technologies are anticipated to enable agile manufacturing processes in response to the growing demand for personalised products/services with shorter lifecycles. This trend has resulted in a gradual transformation of traditional ‘tree-like’ and monolithic systems into complex networks of self-contained and autonomous ‘components’ (a.k.a., Internet of things) and ‘services’ (a.k.a., Internet of services). Cloud Manufacturing is an emerging concept that enables modularisation and service-orientation in the context of manufacturing, in which systematic orchestration, matching, and sharing of services and components are the key. This work develops a framework for dynamic integration of manufacturing services and components in a collaborative network of organisations. The framework dynamically recommends the best matching of services, components and organisations, as well as the best collaboration decisions in terms of sharing (shareable) services and/or components between organisations. The problem is formulated as a bi-objective mixed-integer program, and solved via an efficient socio-inspired tabu search. The objectives of the model are to increase service level and enhance collaboration through maximising service fulfilment and minimising unnecessary sharing of services/components, respectively. Numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the benefits of the developed framework for efficient and optimal (re)configuration of collaborative networked organisations, addressing the Industry 4.0 demand for agility through modularisation and service-orientation.