Supplier Qualification of the Production Chain in Collaborative Manufacturing via Higher Order Group Multi-Role Assignment

In collaborative manufacturing, the customer-to-manufacturer model establishes a direct link between users and suppliers, facilitating a production process driven by personalized demands. Users publish multiple product demands, generating corresponding production tasks, while suppliers are responsible for completing these tasks. This creates higher order many-to-many relationships among users, products, and suppliers, making task assignment more challenging. For this concern, this article formalizes the production task assignment problem in collaborative manufacturing (PTAPCM) by revising the group multi-role assignment (GMRA) model to a higher order GMRA (HOGMRA) model. In HOGMRA, distinguishing the capabilities of each supplier becomes the key issue in solving the PTAPCM. To address this, we propose the supplier qualification algorithm (SQA) and its enhanced version, enhanced supplier qualification algorithm (ESQA). After evaluating supplier qualifications, HOGMRA formulates the PTAPCM as an integer linear programming problem that can be solved by a general-purpose optimizer. Finally, large-scale experiments are carried out to demonstrate the practicability and effectiveness of the proposed solutions.