An integrated framework for active discovery and optimal allocation of smart manufacturing services

Smart manufacturing is gradually recognized and widely adopted due to the promising features of sustainability, flexibility, and collaboration. Service discovery and allocation in smart manufacturing aim to provide on-demand manufacturing capabilities for meeting customized production requirements. They are tightly coupled in practice, whereas they are usually considered as two independent processes and investigated separately in most research. Meanwhile, the collaboration relationship and decision autonomy of service providers are rarely taken into account to perform sustainable and flexible production. To deal with these challenges, this paper proposes an integrated framework to holistically describe the active discovery and optimal allocation of smart manufacturing services. A mechanism is designed to consider the collaborative relationship of manufacturing resources and promote collaborative production. The distributed optimization model based on analytical target cascading method is introduced to maintain the decision autonomy of service providers and achieve the optimal allocation of smart manufacturing services. A case study is further provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.