Value-driven Manufacturing Planning using Cloud-based Evolutionary Optimisation

This paper considers manufacturing planning and scheduling of manufacturing orders whose value decreases over time. The value decrease is modelled with a so-called value curve. Two genetic-algorithm-based methods for multi-objective optimisation have been proposed, implemented and deployed to a cloud. The first proposed method allocates and schedules manufacturing of all the ordered elements optimising both the makespan and the total value, whereas the second method selects only the profitable orders for manufacturing. The proposed evolutionary optimisation has been performed for a set of real-world-inspired manufacturing orders. Both the methods yield a similar total value, but the latter method leads to a shorter makespan.