Integrated optimization of supplier selection and service scheduling in cloud manufacturing environment

Cloud Manufacturing environment enables enterprises to share their resources together for rental profits and customized production. The fact that most manufacturing devices are organized and controlled in a particular production line hinders the flexible use of the corresponding services in a cloud platform. Therefore, the collaborative selection of upper layer suppliers and the underlying manufacturing services is of great importance, but rarely considered. To address the problem, a two-layer integrated model of supplier selection and service scheduling is proposed to provide feasible solutions for different kinds of production requirements. The decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, i.e., MOEA/D, is applied to minimize the production time, the rental cost and the transportation cost for producing a customized product. We empirically demonstrate that the integrated optimization way is more efficient than the original two-step decision way in practice.