Decentralised collaborative job reassignments in additive manufacturing

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) is a promising approach that leverages the sharing economy to reduce costs and enhance supply chain flexibility. Particularly, when utilised alongside Additive Manufacturing (AM), CMfg is considered a key enabler for collaborative production (CP) systems. However, there is still a lack of planning models that reduce entry barriers for CP. Therefore, we propose a decentralised CP planning framework for AM. In our approach, machines autonomously select jobs from an existing production plan to forward them to other suppliers that can produce these parts more efficiently. A CMfg platform facilitates job forwarding and creates promising part bundles and manufacturing machines autonomously places bids on the packages via a combinatorial 2 nd price reverse auction. Costs of the reallocated bundles are shared throughout a Shapley value-based approach without the need to disclose critical information. We benchmark our proposed framework against a centralised planning approach and find that it achieves comparable effectiveness as the benchmark solution. We also show that this mechanism promotes individual rationality and that agents particularly benefit when participating in both offering and acquiring production jobs through the auction.