Cloud manufacturing: a new manufacturing paradigm

Combining with the emerged technologies such as cloud computing, the Internet of things, service-oriented technologies and high performance computing, a new manufacturing paradigm – cloud manufacturing (CMfg) – for solving the bottlenecks in the informatisation development and manufacturing applications is introduced. The concept of CMfg, including its architecture, typical characteristics and the key technologies for implementing a CMfg service platform, is discussed. Three core components for constructing a CMfg system, i.e. CMfg resources, manufacturing cloud service and manufacturing cloud are studied, and the constructing method for manufacturing cloud is investigated. Finally, a prototype of CMfg and the existing related works conducted by the authors' group on CMfg are briefly presented.     

Robust and stable multi-task manufacturing scheduling with uncertainties using a two-stage extended genetic algorithm

ABSTRACT

In cloud manufacturing (CMfg), unexpected uncertainties can occur in real-world manufacturing processes that could make the predetermined schedule infeasible. A new multi-objective proactive method is proposed in this situation to evaluate the proactive schedule. A novel two-stage extended genetic algorithm (2S-EGA) is proposed to generate proactive schedules that consider service interruptions. The experimental results confirmed that the obtained proactive schedule produces great performance when applied to multi-task scheduling problems with service interruptions. Furthermore, the results also showed that the proactive schedule obtained by the proposed approach is more robust and stable than other baseline algorithms taken from the literature.