An ANN-Based Approach for Real-Time Scheduling in Cloud Manufacturing

• Main Authors: Shengkai Chen, Shuliang Fang, Renzhong Tang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-04-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: cloud manufacturing; real-time scheduling problem; artificial neural network
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/7/2491

The cloud manufacturing platform needs to allocate the endlessly emerging tasks to the resources scattered in different places for processing. However, this real-time scheduling problem in the cloud environment is more complicated than that in a traditional workshop because constraints, such as type matching, task precedence, resource occupation, and logistics duration, need to be met, and the internal manufacturing plan of providers must also be considered. Since the platform aggregates massive manufacturing resources to serve large-scale manufacturing tasks, the space of feasible solutions is huge, resulting in many conventional search algorithms no longer being applicable. In this paper, we considered resource allocation as the key procedure for real-time scheduling, and an ANN (Artificial Neural Network) based model is established to predict the task completion status for resource allocation among candidates. The trained ANN model has high prediction accuracy, and the ANN-based scheduling approach performs better than the preferred method in terms of the optimization objectives, including total cost, service satisfaction, and make-span. In addition, the proposed approach has potential in the application for smart manufacturing or Industry 4.0 because of its high response performance and good scalability.