Collaborative optimization for scheduling manufacturing tasks and transport vehicles considering manufacturer’s time availability in cloud manufacturing

As an advanced networked intelligent manufacturing model, cloud manufacturing (CMfg) effectively integrates available resources by strengthening the connection among various manufacturers to solve complex manufacturing problems. Due to the geographical dispersion of manufacturers and the cooperativity nature of the manufacturing process, logistic impacts are non-negligible in scheduling. This paper focuses on the collaborative scheduling of manufacturing and transportation services. To make full use of the manufacturer's capacity without affecting his benefit, local tasks are scheduled with higher priority on a manufacturer while the service time for CMfg tasks is assumed to be fragmented and represented as a set of available time windows. Based on these considerations, a collaborative optimization model for CMfg on task and vehicle scheduling with manufacturing service windows is established, in which the completion time of all CMfg orders and the total idle traveling time of vehicles are minimized to ensure the efficiency of both manufacturing and logistic service. A dual-loop variable neighborhood search algorithm is designed to solve the problem. Comprehensive experiments are conducted, showing improvements of 2.41% to 29.57% in objective and fewer vehicles needed compared with some existing methods, which validate the efficacy of the proposed model and method.