1768 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 19, NO.
2, FEBRUARY 2023
Platform-Based Manufacturing Service
Collaboration: A Supply-Demand Aware
Adaptive Scheduling Mechanism
Jiawei Ren, Ying Cheng , Feng Xiang , and Fei Tao , Member, IEEE
Abstract—With the development of new-generated IT
technologies and the launch of a series of industrial In-
ternet of things platforms, service-oriented manufacturing
is an inevitable trend of manufacturing industry. There-
fore, the platform-based manufacturing service collabora-
tion (MSC) becomes a recognized answer to the complex
and personalized manufacturing demands. However, the
changes in both supply and demand of the platform in
its operation process are usually unpredictable. To cope
with the scheduling problem on the platform-based MSC
with the dynamic uncertainties of both supply and de-
mand, an adaptive scheduling mechanism is explored in
this article. In which, the real-time system state evaluation
method considering supply and demand are designed, and
a supply-demand aware rescheduling trigger judgement
is proposed. Experimental results show the effectiveness
and adaptiveness of the proposed mechanism, which also
provides a reference for other MSC scheduling problems
towards different dynamic situations.
Index Terms—Adaptive scheduling mechanism, dynamic
scheduling, manufacturing service collaboration (MSC),
platform, supply-demand matching.
I. INTRODUCTION
OWADAYS, with the development of information tech-
N nology and manufacturing globalization, three main chal-
lenges of manufacturing industry gradually appear in re-
searchers’ vision, which are personalized requirements, com-
plicated product and low added value [1]. For the simple small
Manuscript received 27 January 2022; revised 18 April 2022 and 3
June 2022; accepted 29 June 2022. Date of publication 6 July 2022;
date of current version 13 December 2022. This work was supported in
part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant
52175448 and Grant 52120105008, in part by the Fundamental Re-
search Funds for the Central Universities under Grant YWF-22-L-1182,
and in part by the Fund of Key Laboratory for Metallurgical Equipment
and Control of Ministry of Education in Wuhan University of Science and
Technology under Grant 2018B04. Paper no. TII-22-0436. (Correspond-
ing author: Ying Cheng.)
Jiawei Ren, Ying Cheng, and Fei Tao are with the School of
Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang Univer-
sity (BUAA), Beijing 100191, China (e-mail: jren06@buaa.edu.cn;
ycheng@buaa.edu.cn; ftao@buaa.edu.cn).
Feng Xiang is with the Key Laboratory of Metallurgical Equipment
and Control of Ministry of Education, Wuhan University of Science and
Technology, Wuhan 430081, China (e-mail: xiangfeng@wust.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more figures in this article are available at
https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2022.3188549.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TII.2022.3188549
1551-3203 © 2022 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITY PUTRA MALAYSIA. Downloaded on September 07,2023 at 12:32:00 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can hardly cover all the
product manufacturing processes. In order to meet the chal-
lenges, manufacturing service collaboration (MSC) has become
an effective way to solve the problem of personalized complex
product manufacturing and increase the value creation of man-
ufacturing processes [2].
So far, MSC has gone through three phases, which are in-
traenterprise collaboration, interenterprise collaboration, and
platform-based collaboration [3]. Today, with the concept such
as industry Internet of things (IIoT) platforms as well as industry
cloud platforms putting forward, platform-based collaboration
has become the main development trend of MSC [4]. Even
now, platform-based MSC has been put into use on a gradually
increasing scale [5]. However, there are still many obstacles for
this, such as insufficient digitalization of manufacturing equip-
ment, manufacturing enterprises reluctantly to release data, lack
of cloud computing capacity, and so on. However, just from the
perspective of platform operations, one of the crucial issues is
that to achieve optimal matching and scheduling which contains
so many dynamic uncertainties of supply and demand [6].
From some point of view, the scheduling problem of platform-
based MSC just refers to dispatch the manufacturing demands
to resources, which are in the form of services, or allocate the
resources to demands in a specific time interval in order to
execute manufacturing tasks and satisfy customers’ personalized
requirements. In other point of view, all these activities on
the platform including decomposition of the complex tasks,
composition of the individual services, mapping of the services
and tasks, optimization of the service selection, and even the
first point of view are all contained in the broad meaning of the
scheduling problem [7].
However, in the changing state of production environment and
production system, it is difficult for traditional MSC scheduling
methods to realize intelligent scheduling in the unpredictable
and changeable situations for the increasingly complex and
dynamic manufacturing task demands and massive and diverse
manufacturing resource services [8]. Therefore, it is urgent to
develop the scheduling methods more adaptive for the environ-
ment in which the platform operates.
Therefore, scheduling of platform-based MSC is one of the
key scientific problems in its operation management. In this
article, 1) the dynamic simulation of platform-based MSC is re-
alized by adjusting the tasks in priority, 2) an adaptive scheduling
REN et al.: PLATFORM-BASED MANUFACTURING SERVICE COLLABORATION: A SUPPLY-DEMAND
mechanism based on supply and demand real-time evaluation is
proposed, and 3) according to the experimental results, theoret-
ical basis is provided for the scheduling problems in different
situations.
II. RELATED WORK
A. Platform-Based Manufacturing Service Collaboration
Since the 1960s, with the rapid development of computer
technology and network communication technology, the in-
formatization wave characterized by digitization, networking
and intelligence has promoted the productivity of manufacturing
enterprises greatly. The emerging platform-based MSC provides
enterprises and individual users with extensive parallel com-
puting, distributed computing and grid computing capabilities
in the mode of “Infrastructure-as-service, platform-as-service,
and software-as-service,” and promotes the production and de-
velopment of modern manufacturing industry based on product
demand [9]. The development of the platform-based MSC can
be mainly divided into three stages, enterprise private platform,
public platform, and IIoT platforms [10]. The enterprise pri-
vate platforms are mainly applied to internal informatization of
enterprises, such as MES, ERP, SCADA, and WMS systems.
Virtual computing of platform-based MSC is used to integrate
the internal resource services of an enterprise. Based on SOA
mode, application service-based assembly, flexible platform
expansion, virtual resource supply, and intelligent management
support are realized to improve the production management level
and process operation mechanism of an enterprise. The public
platforms are mainly used by enterprises to provide direct ser-
vices to external users with their own manufacturing resources.
A public platform integrates resources and capabilities to real-
ize information distribution and integration, so as to generate
services and applications that can be directly used by users,
greatly improving enterprise resource management efficiency
and data processing capability. Currently, with the support of
new-generated information technologies, a number of platforms,
which called IIoT platforms are gradually implemented [11],
such as GE Predix platform, Siemens Mindsphere platform,
ABB Ability platform, Haier COSMO platform, and SANY
Roots Interconnection platform. The IIoT platforms take service
as the core, realizing enterprise resources socialized sharing
and collaboration. With improving of manufacturing enterprise
informatization, the platforms will aggregate manufacturing re-
sources and capabilities in the form of manufacturing services
across different fields or industries. The aggregated services
can be effectively controlled and dispatched with the formation
of crowdsourced production [12], cloud manufacturing mode
[13], to response personalized user requirements timely. At the
same time, the collaborative ability and effect between any two
enterprises can be effectively improved. In addition, the value
adding and the utility of services can be improved significantly.
Overall, currently, there are three definite trends of the
platform-based MSC, which are, 1) more manufacturing re-
sources are accessed to the platforms, 2) the number and com-
plexity of requirements submitted to the platforms increased,
and 3) the aggregation of both manufacturing resources and
Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITY PUTRA MALAYSIA. Downloaded on September 07,2023 at 12:32:00 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
1769
tasks, i.e., the supply and demand of platform-based MSC, is
enhanced.
So far, as a key of the platform-based manufacturing service
collaboration, the studies of supply-demand of the MSC is
not enough. Some studied on supply-demand of the MSC is
in the platform modeling [14], supply and demand matching
[15], and optimization problems [16]. Hardly considered the
supply-demand of the MSC as the core of dynamic scheduling
aim at dynamic uncertainty.
B. Adaptive Scheduling Methods
An adaptive scheduling method refers to the formulation of
corresponding scheduling methods or strategies according to
the scheduling system state and external disturbance in the dy-
namic uncertain environment to achieve adaptability to different
system states and requirements [17]. Basically, there are two
main problems of the adaptive scheduling method to figure with,
which are “When to schedule” and “How to schedule” [18].
As the term of “When to schedule”, the scheduling mechanism
also called rescheduling mechanism was studied by lots of
researchers. The scheduling mechanism drives the scheduling
process in an appropriate timing, which lead the scheduling
systems to achieve optimal results for a period of time, so that the
scheduling mechanism is regarded as the core of dynamic uncer-
tain scheduling problems. The classical scheduling mechanisms
mainly include two categories, which are periodic scheduling
and event-driven scheduling [18]. As early as in 1992, the
researchers have already done detailed analysis and comparison
of periodic scheduling and event-driven scheduling in the job
shop scheduling problem [19]. Compared with event-driven
scheduling, which has stronger real-time performance, periodic
scheduling is better in system stability, and easy realization, but
the disadvantages of the above two mechanisms are also obvious.
The follow-up studies focus on the hybrid-driven scheduling,
which combine periodic scheduling with event-driven schedul-
ing to get the advantages of both. Researchers have already
proposed lots of hybrid-driven scheduling mechanisms, such as
scheduling mechanism based on the implicit interference [20],
scheduling cost [21], expected effect of disturbance [22], and so
on, in many different areas [23].
Once the scheduling timing is decided, there would be one or a
bunch of dynamic events to deal with. So, it is necessary to solve
the problem of “How to schedule,” which leads to the constantly
research of the optimization algorithms and scheduling rules.
Different from the problem of “When to schedule,” the problem
of “How to schedule,” is more focus on solving each static
scheduling problem quickly and accurately in every scheduling
interval.
The most commonly used intelligent optimization algorithms
can be mainly divided into some categories, such as swarm
intelligence algorithm, genetic algorithm (GA), and simulated
annealing algorithm [24]. In order to improve the adaptiveness
of the intelligent optimization algorithms, researchers proposed
a series of improvements. The specific implementation methods
include the improvement based on population and control pa-
rameter optimization [25], taking measures to control population
diversity [26], and introducing new operators [27].
1770 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 19, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2023

Generally, the scheduling rules including the earliest due TABLE I

NOTATIONS USED IN PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
date (EDD) rule, the shortest processing time (SPT) rule, the
modified job due date (MDD) rule, the modified operation due
date (MOD) rule, and so on. As well, a bunch of basic schedul-
ing rules with the mapping relationships of different system
states or a scheduling rule that keeps learning and evolving
with the environment can be called as the adaptive scheduling
rule [28]. Since around 2000, some researchers have applied
reinforcement learning (RL) methods to optimal scheduling
problems [29]. At first, they applied RL to dynamic single
scheduling research and the appropriate dispatching rule was
selected dynamically in correspondence with different situations
and system states [30]. Then, many other difficult problems
such as multimachine scheduling and multiobjective scheduling
problems were studied as well [31].

C. Research Gap
With the rapid development of platform-based MSC, the con-
tinuous growth of the scale of the supply and demand leads to the
increasingly uncertainty of the platform. Sometime the classical
scheduling methods are difficult to meet the requirements. So
that, a MSC scheduling mechanism with more adaptive for the
environment is required urgently.
According to the relevant studies of “When to schedule” and
“How to schedule”. It can be seen that, for any bunch of dynamic
events, the optimization algorithms and scheduling rules could
help to obtain an optimal solution. However, for the continuous
scheduling problems in uncertainty dynamic environment, the
scheduling mechanisms adaptive to the dynamic events and the
system condition is the key.
However, the existing hybrid-driven scheduling mechanisms
hardly consider both the state of supply and demand, and lack of
the dynamic uncertainty simulation of platform environment. So
that, in this article, a supply-demand aware adaptive scheduling
mechanism is proposed and verified with the proposed dynamic
uncertainty simulation environment.

III. PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

A. Notations and Assumptions
According to the previous relevant studies, mostly, descrip-
tion of the MSC scheduling problems include three categories,
the task-related parameters, the service-related parameters, and
the scheduling process-related parameters. In this article, the
scheduling problem is described as that there are M service
communities, which was aggregated from some single services
with similar functions and the service number of each com-
munity can be represented as Srw , r = 1, 2, 3, . . . , Rw . Also,
there are N manufacturing tasks, which can be represented as
Tn , n = 1, 2, 3, . . . , N . So that, the tasks should be decom-
posed into serval subtasks sTnk , which can be executed by
any single suitable-function service. The scheduling problem of
platform-based MSC is trying to find a reasonable distribution
of manufacturing services in order to execute the manufacturing
tasks with high quality and efficiency. The notations used in the
formulation of the problem are listed in Table I.

Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITY PUTRA MALAYSIA. Downloaded on September 07,2023 at 12:32:00 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
REN et al.: PLATFORM-BASED MANUFACTURING SERVICE COLLABORATION: A SUPPLY-DEMAND 1771

The studied scheduling problem in this article is subject to the

following assumptions:
1) all service resources are available at beginning;
2) any task cannot be scheduled until it arrives;
3) the resources type and number demanded by tasks are
fixed;
4) any subtask cannot be executed until all of its preceding
subtasks are completed;
5) it cannot be interrupted once a task is started;
6) the execution time, quality and cost of resources are
known;
7) the execution time of all subtasks are determined by the
resources with longest execution time.

B. Objective Functions
Different from the normal static scheduling problems usually Fig. 1. Supply-demand aware adaptive scheduling process.
use some static objectives such as makespan, quality, and cost,
due to the complexity and uncertainty of the environment in the
platform-based MSC processes, it needs to introduce suitable stability the MSC environment is. The computational formula
objectives for the dynamic scheduling problem, which including of the scheduling stability is shown in formula
task tardy time, task waiting time, scheduling system stability, N

i rti−1
 
system balance, and so on. Stability = Xn × 1 − rti Yn
In this problem, especially the dynamic uncertain scheduling n=1
problem, to a great extent, tardiness, and latency of the man-  
× 1 − rti Zn × (planTni finish − planT ni−1 finish )2 .
ufacturing tasks represent the optimum level of the scheduling
(6)
solution in the time dimension. So, tardiness and latency can be
considered as time-relevant objectives. The tardiness and latency The other constraints are shown from (7)–(11). Formulas (7)
are defined as following formulas: and (8) reflect the constraint of operation sequences and re-
sources constraint. Furthermore, (9)–(11) reflect the task quality,
N
 total cost, and the stability of each scheduling process should be
Tardiness = min max ((Tnfinish − Tndue ) , 0) (1)
limited in a predefined range
n=1
N
 sT nk start + sT nk execute ≤ sT nk+1 start (7)
Latency = min Tnstart − Tnarrive . (2) Rw

t
n=1 Urw ≤ Rw (8)
Manufacturing cost and quality of service are more general m=1
objective functions. Different from tardiness and latency, cost, Tnquality ≤ Qcons (9)
and quality are considered as time-irrelevant objectives. They
N

can be calculated by formulas
Tncost ≤ Ccons (10)
N
 1 n=1
Quality = min (3)
n=1
Tnquality I

i
Stability ≤ Scons . (11)
N
 i=1
Cost = min Tncost . (4)
n=1
IV. SUPPLY-DEMAND AWARE ADAPTIVE SCHEDULING
Based on (1)–(4), the objective function is normalized as MECHANISM
shown in (5), the value of w represents the weights of different
objectives The adaptive scheduling refers to the timely adjustment of
scheduling scheme based on the initial scheduling scheme and
min(weight1 ∗ Tardiness + weight2 ∗ Latency the actual state of the system. Therefore, the tasks need to be
scheduled at each scheduling time, including the tasks that have
+ weight3 ∗ Quality + weight4 ∗ Cost). (5)
not been executed and the newly arrived tasks.
As the flowchart shown in Fig. 1, a supply-demand aware
C. Constrains
adaptive scheduling mechanism is proposed for the problem
To limit the stability of the scheduling problem, the changes of platform-based MSC. First, in the initial moment when
of each rescheduled scheme are chosen to represent the stability t = 0, initialize the information of manufacturing tasks and
in each scheduling process. The smaller the changes, the more services, and use intelligent optimization algorithms or other
Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITY PUTRA MALAYSIA. Downloaded on September 07,2023 at 12:32:00 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
1772 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 19, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2023

methods to solve the scheduling problem in the initial moment. process would be executed. What needs to be stated is that, the
Then, when a dynamic event occurs, such as a task arrives or a adaptive scheduling threshold is not a fixed value, it should be
service change, the information of tasks and services would be adjusted with the change of system state in real time.
updated, the system state would be evaluated by combining the
service capacity and task load state of the platform-based MSC.
When the system state meets the rescheduling condition, the V. EXPERIMENT AND ANALYSIS
rescheduling process would be triggered, and the rescheduling To verify the availability and effectiveness of the proposed
scheme would be solved and executed until the next reschedule adaptive scheduling mechanism, the simulation experiment is
process triggered or all tasks are finished executing. executed. To simulate the scheduling problem precisely, the
simulation is divided into three stages, including 1) to generate
A. System State Evaluation Considering Supply and different scheduling situations for experimental, 2) to analyze
Demand the performance of different rescheduling thresholds under dif-
Based on the adaptive scheduling process mentioned previ- ferent situations, and 3) to compare the proposed mechanism
ously, it is necessary to evaluate the state of the supply and with other mechanisms.
demand on the platform.
Considering the scarcity of services, the manufacturing ser- A. Experimental Setting
vice capacity could be evaluated by the available manufacturing
service resources in the platform. The system service capacity For the advantages of fast convergency and global optimiza-
at time t is evaluated by formulas tion, GA is used to solve the scheduling scheme. In this ex-
periment, the population size is 200, and the generation num-
t
Service capability = (t Service capability1 , ber is 100. The selection probability, mutation probability and
t crossover probability are all adapted to the individual fitness in
Service capability2 , . . . , t Service capabilityw ) (12)
each generation. The experiment was programmed with MAT-
Rw
 LAB R2019a and performed on a 64-bit Windows10 operating
t w
 
Service capability = 1 − t Urw . (13) system with 2.50 GHz.
r=1 1) Experimental Parameters: According to the platform-
Considering the manufacturing tasks are personalized and based MSC in practical, considering the randomness and un-
dynamic, the task load state could be evaluated by service certainty of tasks, a test data generation method of MSC was
resources demand and the task urgency. The system task load presented. Specifically, the randomness of the arrival time of
state at time t is evaluated by formulas manufacturing tasks and the uncertainty of manufacturing ser-
t
  vices required by the tasks are considered. Therefore, in the
Task load = t Task load1 , t Task load2 , . . . , t Task loadw experiment, under the condition of constant total time and total
resource demand, by adjusting the scale of services and the
(14)
randomness and uncertainty of tasks, the adaptive scheduling
N Tn
  thresholds in different situations are analyzed and the effective-
t
number
 
Task loadw = t
Xn × 1 − t ynk ness of the scheduling mechanism is verified.
n=1 k=1 First, set the total task number as N , in the time interval
  Tnexpect [0, T ], the arrival time of tasks subject to uniform distribution
× 1 − t znk × × sT nkw number . Tn arrive ∼ U ( TN ∗n−T T ∗n−T
Tndue − t −1 − τ, N −1 + τ ). The larger the τ , the
stronger randomness of the arrival time distribution.
(15)
Then, represent the average requirement of services of type
w as Rwmean . The required service of task Tn is represented as
B. Supply-Demand Aware Rescheduling Trigger
sT nw number. sT nw number is positive integers and subjects to uni-
Judgement
form distribution sT w n number ∼ U (Rwmean − γ, Rwmean + γ).
For the reason that the system scheduling difficulties is usually The larger the γ, the stronger the uncertainty of the number
limited by scarce resources, i.e., resources with larger ratio of of the required services.
task load and service capacity. So that, represent maximum value Finally, four service scales will be set, corresponding to
of the ratio of task load and service capacity at time t as t θ, which several situations from scarce to sufficient services. The scale
is calculated by formula of each service resources Rwsum are, respectively, 2∗Rwmean ,
t
Task load 3∗Rwmean ,4∗Rwmean , 5∗Rwmean .
t
θ = max t . (16) Besides, the constrains including quality, cost and stability
Service capability
are all set, as shown in Table II.
Based on the ratio of task load and service capacity, the system 2) Situation Setting: Adjusting the randomness and uncer-
state would be evaluated in real time in order to decide whether tainty parameters of tasks, as well as the total number of services,
to trigger the rescheduling process or not, and to adjust the adap- there are six different situations designed and analyzed in the
tive rescheduling threshold θn . Once t θ ≥ θn , the rescheduling experiment. The designed six situations are shown in Table III.

Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITY PUTRA MALAYSIA. Downloaded on September 07,2023 at 12:32:00 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
REN et al.: PLATFORM-BASED MANUFACTURING SERVICE COLLABORATION: A SUPPLY-DEMAND
TABLE II
VALUE AND RANGES OF EXPERIMENTAL PARAMETERS
TABLE III
DIFFERENT SITUATIONS SETTING OF EXPERIMENTAL
Fig. 2. Algorithm convergence process of 30 times scheduling.
B. Experimental Results
1) Algorithm Convergence Verification: To verify the validity
of the proposed adaptive scheduling mechanism, it is necessary
to verify the convergence of the optimization algorithm at first.
Because of the large number of groups of experiment, an ex-
periment with Situation 3 ( Rwsum = 3 ∗ Rwmean , τ = 0, γ = 0)
is chosen to demonstrate, when the rescheduling threshold θ =
0.8. As shown in Fig. 2, there are total 30 times of scheduling
process, and in each rescheduling process the fitness function
can always convergence to the approximate optimal solution.
2) Performance Analysis and Suggestion Under Different
Rescheduling Threshold: By adjusting the rescheduling thresh-
old, the experimental results under different situations with
different rescheduling thresholds are obtained. As some experi-
mental results obviously exceed the constraints of the problem,
only the experimental results within the constraints are selected.
Due to space limitations, four results are mainly analyzed as
follows.
Result and Suggestion 1: There is no significant correlation
between cost and quality indicators and rescheduling thresh-
old. So, when choosing appropriate rescheduling threshold,
the influence to cost and quality can be considered in less
priority.
Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITY PUTRA MALAYSIA. Downloaded on September 07,2023 at 12:32:00 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
1773
Fig. 3. Changes of time-irrelevant objectives in different situations. (a)
Total cost. (b) Total quality.
Through the statistical analysis of the experimental data,
as shown in Fig. 3(a) and (b), in different situations, with
the increasing of rescheduling threshold, the cost and quality
have no obvious change. It shows that under the experimental
setting, the service cost and quality have no significant corre-
lation with rescheduling threshold. It is because weather the
value of rescheduling threshold is, it is equivalent to a service
optimization in terms of cost and quality. Therefore, from the
result, adjusting the rescheduling threshold has little influence
on service cost and quality.
Result and Suggestion 2: For most situations, the times of
rescheduling reach the minimal when t θ = θ , mostly θ ∈
[1.11.2]. So, when the system has high requirement on the times
of rescheduling, choose the rescheduling threshold in the interval
of θ ∈ [1.11.2] could be a better choice.
As shown in Fig. 4, by comparing and analyzing the experi-
mental data of six situations, it can be roughly divided into three
types, which are types with sufficient supply, supply-demand
balance, and insufficient supply, and the interval of θ is shown
as the red lines, respectively.
1774 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 19, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2023
Fig. 4. Changes of rescheduling times for different situations. (a) For resource-sufficient type (situations 1, 2, and 3). (b) For supply-demand
balance type (situations 4 and 5). (c) For resource insufficient type (situations 6).
Fig. 5. Changes of time-relevant objectives in different situations. (a)
Total latency. (b) Total tardiness.
Wherein, situations 1, 2, and 3 are the type with sufficient
supply. As shown in Fig. 4(a), their typical characteristics are that
when θ = 0, the rescheduling times is equal to the number of
tasks, which is equivalent to the event-driven scheduling mech-
anism. When 0 < t θ ≤ θ , in general, the times of rescheduling
Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITY PUTRA MALAYSIA. Downloaded on September 07,2023 at 12:32:00 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
decreases with the increase of rescheduling threshold, and when
t
θ ≥ θ , the times of rescheduling process increases with the
increase of rescheduling threshold. It is because that with the
increase of rescheduling threshold, the number of accumulated
tasks for each rescheduling will increase. When the existing
services of the system can meet the need of each rescheduling,
the times of rescheduling will decrease. When the rescheduling
threshold is less than 1.1, the services required for each schedule
are roughly equal to the available services in the system, and
the times of rescheduling reach the minimum value. When the
threshold is greater than 1.2, it means that the system cannot im-
mediately allocate enough services to tasks in each scheduling,
and some tasks are postponed to next scheduling, which leads
to increasing of the times of rescheduling.
For situations 4 and 5, they are the type with supply-demand
balance. As shown in Fig. 4(b), when θ = 0, the same as the
type with sufficient supply, the times of rescheduling is equal to
the number of tasks. When 0 < t θ ≤ θ , there is different from
the type with sufficient supply, the times of rescheduling is still
approximately equal to task number, and when t θ ≥ θ , the times
of rescheduling increase with the increase of the rescheduling
threshold. Because of the balance between the demand of ser-
vices and tasks, when the rescheduling threshold is less than
1.1, the services are enough to be allocated for each demand
of rescheduling. However, when the rescheduling threshold is
larger than 1.2, some tasks are postponed to next rescheduling
process, because the system cannot allocate sufficient services
to the tasks immediately. As a result, the times of rescheduling
increase.
The results on the type with insufficient supply (i.e., situation
6), are, as shown in Fig. 4(c). Different from the other two types,
when θ = 0 , there are 40 times of rescheduling, which is more
than the number of tasks, and the times of rescheduling will
continue to rise basically with the increase of threshold. Which
means that, with the augmentation of randomness or uncertainty
of tasks, the task load would beyond the system service capacity
in a local time interval, so that more rescheduling processes are
required.
Result and Suggestion 3: Tardiness and latency increase with
the increase of rescheduling threshold, but decrease suddenly
in some specific values. Therefore, when the system has strict
REN et al.: PLATFORM-BASED MANUFACTURING SERVICE COLLABORATION: A SUPPLY-DEMAND 1775

Fig. 6. Latency of 30 tasks in each rescheduling threshold of situation.

time constraint, choose the rescheduling threshold as small as

possible. However, if higher rescheduling threshold is required,
try to avoid the maximum value of Latency and Tardiness.
The results on tardiness and latency change of different
rescheduling threshold in different situations are shown in
Fig. 5(a) and (b).
On the whole, tardiness and latency shows an upward trend,
but at some specific value there are sudden decreases in each
situation. In order to analyze the reason of the sudden decreases,
the latency change of situation 1 is chosen as an example to study
because of its significant feature. As shown in Fig. 6, latency
of 30 tasks of each rescheduling threshold is shown on the
circumference. It is clearly that, with the increase of rescheduling
threshold, latency of each task would increase evenly, until a
sudden decrease by the increase of average rescheduling task
number. For example, when θ = 0.5, there are two tasks be
dispatched in each rescheduling process, but the tasks are not
dispatched immediately.
Result and Suggestion 4: The system stability presents a
step characteristic, and is obviously affected by the scale of
services and the randomness and uncertainty of tasks. Therefore,
it is necessary to be clear about the maximum value of the
rescheduling threshold to avoid the system stability collapse.
The results on stability change of different rescheduling
thresholds are shown in Fig. 7(a). By comparing the system
stability change of six situations, it can be easily obtained that,
1) when the task is regular, as the growth of the scale of services,
the system critical stability threshold also increases, 2) when the
scale of services is certain, as the growth of the randomness and
uncertainty of tasks, the system critical stability threshold would
shrink, and 3) within the scope of the system critical stability
threshold, overall, the system stability can be guaranteed. How-
ever, when θ = 0.6, there are three tasks be dispatched in each
rescheduling process and the tasks are dispatched immediately,
which leads to the sudden decrease of total latency. After that,
latency increases continuously, until there are four tasks to be
dispatched in each rescheduling process.
In order to do some further analysis of the system critical Fig. 7. Analysis of rescheduling stability in different situations. (a)
stability threshold, it can be obtained that, the system stability is Changes of system stability. (b) Maximum number of dispatched tasks.

Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITY PUTRA MALAYSIA. Downloaded on September 07,2023 at 12:32:00 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
1776
Fig. 8. Comparison of the proposed mechanism and periodic
rescheduling. (a) Situation 1 when θ = 0.9, Δt = 30. (b) Situation
6 when θ = 0.9, Δt = 10.
significantly correlated with the maximum number of dispatched
tasks. As shown in Fig. 7(b), for most of situations, the system
stability takes a step when the maximum number of dispatched
tasks rise to a larger value. And the maximum number of
dispatched tasks can be affected by the scale of services and
the randomness and uncertainty of tasks. The former provides
enough service capability to dispatch more tasks, the latter could
lead to sudden increase of task load in a short period of time,
which may be the reason of system stability collapse.
3) Adaptive Scheduling Mechanism Superiority Verification:
As the core of the proposed mechanism is the supply-demand
aware adaptive scheduling mechanism, it is necessary to com-
pare the performance of the proposed mechanism with two clas-
sical scheduling mechanisms, which are event-driven reschedul-
ing and periodic rescheduling, to verify the superiority of the
proposed mechanism.
As aforementioned, event-driven scheduling mechanism is
equivalent to the result when θ = 0 of the proposed mech-
anism. So, it can be regarded as a special case, which placed
more emphasis on scheduling efficiency. It logically follows that
the adaptive scheduling mechanism is superior to event-driven
Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITY PUTRA MALAYSIA. Downloaded on September 07,2023 at 12:32:00 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 19, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2023
rescheduling. As shown in Fig. 8, to compare with periodic
rescheduling, when the task is regular, as in Fig. 8(a), a par-
ticular scheduling period can have similar scheduling effects
with the corresponding rescheduling threshold. However, when
the randomness and uncertainty of tasks growth, as in Fig. 8(b),
it is difficult for periodic rescheduling to accurately identify the
situation at that time, and it is easy to lead to system stability
fluctuation. Meanwhile, it is difficult to guarantee scheduling
efficiency.
VI. CONCLUSION
For the problem of platform-based MSC with the dynamic
and uncertain environment of both supply and demand, a supply-
demand aware adaptive scheduling mechanism was proposed in
this article, based on the careful analysis of the previous studies
in the related fields. The main contributions are summarized as
follows. First, the model of platform-based MSC scheduling was
established and described. Then, the real-time system state was
evaluated with the proposed supply-demand aware indicators,
which were task load and service capability. Based on the indica-
tors, the supply-demand aware adaptive scheduling mechanism
was explored. Furthermore, there were groups of experiment un-
der six situations with different characteristics conducted. Based
on the results analysis, four findings were concluded. Finally, the
effectiveness and superiority of the propose mechanism were
verified.
However, there are still some work need to be further solved.
In terms of the idealized problem model used in this article, it
may lead to the difficulty to provide an in-practice guidance
for the operation of the actual platforms. For the dynamic
optimization of multiobjective problems, the weighted normal-
ization method is adopted, which is not conducive to achieve
multiobjective optimization. In future, the multiobjective opti-
mization algorithms with adaptiveness will be discussed. For
the experimental results, although the results under different sit-
uations have been analyzed in detail, the dynamic uncertainties
of platform-based MSC still have not been fully discussed. It is
also one of the most important goals in further research.
REFERENCES
[1] H. Li, K. C. C. Chan, M. Liang, and X. Luo, “Composition of resource-
service chain for cloud manufacturing,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Informat.,
vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 211–219, Feb. 2016.
[2] Y. Zhang, F. Tao, Y. Liu, P. Zhang, Y. Cheng, and Y. Zuo, “Long/short-
term utility aware optimal selection of manufacturing service composition
toward industrial internet platforms,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Informat., vol. 15,
no. 6, pp. 3712–3722, Jun. 2019.
[3] J. -Q. Li, F. R. Yu, G. Deng, C. Luo, Z. Ming, and Q. Yan, “Industrial inter-
net: A survey on the enabling technologies, applications, and challenges,”
IEEE Commun. Surv. Tut., vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 1504–1526, Jul.–Sep. 2017.
[4] A. Tiwana, B. Konsynski, and A. Bush, “Research commentary-platform
evolution: Coevolution of platform architecture, governance, and environ-
mental dynamics,” Inf. Syst. Res., vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 675–687, 2010.
[5] J. -Q. Li, F. R. Yu, G. Deng, C. Luo, Z. Ming, and Q. Yan, “Industrial inter-
net: A survey on the enabling technologies, applications, and challenges,”
IEEE Commun. Surv. Tut., vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 1504–1526, Jul–Sep. 2017.
[6] W. Du, Y. Tang, S. Y. S. Leung, L. Tong, A. V. Vasilakos, and F. Qian,
“Robust order scheduling in the discrete manufacturing industry: A mul-
tiobjective optimization approach,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Informat., vol. 14,
no. 1, pp. 253–264, Jan. 2018.
REN et al.: PLATFORM-BASED MANUFACTURING SERVICE COLLABORATION: A SUPPLY-DEMAND
[7] L. Yin, J. Luo, and H. Luo, “Tasks scheduling and resource allocation in
fog computing based on containers for smart manufacturing,” IEEE Trans.
Ind. Informat., vol. 14, no. 10, pp. 4712–4721, Oct. 2018.
[8] M. Wazed, S. Ahmed, and Y. Nukman, “Uncertainty factors in real
manufacturing environment,” Australian J. Basic Appl. Sci., vol. 3, no. 2,
pp. 342–351, 2009.
[9] S. K. Sowmya, P. Deepika, and J. Naren, “Layers of cloud–IaaS, PaaS
and SaaS: A survey,” Int. J. Comput. Sci. Inf. Technol., vol. 5, no. 3,
pp. 4477–4480, 2014.
[10] F. Tao et al., “Digital twin and blockchain enhanced smart manufac-
turing service collaboration and management,” J. Manuf. Syst., vol. 62,
pp. 903–914, 2022.
[11] A. Montarnal et al., “A social platform for knowledge gathering and
exploitation, towards the deduction of inter-enterprise collaborations,”
Procedia Comput. Sci., vol. 60, pp. 438–447, 2015.
[12] Y. Sun and C. Cao, “Intra-and inter-regional research collaboration across
organizational boundaries: Evolving patterns in China,” Technol. Forecast-
ing Social Change, vol. 96, pp. 215–231, 2015.
[13] P. Hofmann and D. Woods, “Cloud computing: The limits of public
clouds for business applications,” IEEE Internet Comput., vol. 14, no. 6,
pp. 90–93, Nov./Dec. 2010.
[14] Y. Cheng et al., “Modeling of manufacturing service supply–demand
matching hypernetwork in service-oriented manufacturing systems,”
Robot. Comput.-Integr. Manuf., vol. 45, pp. 59–72, 2017.
[15] Y. Cheng, Y. Xie, D. Zhao, P. Ji, and F. Tao, “Scalable hypernetwork-
based manufacturing services supply demand matching toward industrial
internet platforms,” IEEE Trans. Syst., Man, Cybern., Syst., vol. 50, no. 12,
pp. 5000–5014, Dec. 2020.
[16] R. Hao et al., “Manufacturing service supply-demand optimization with
dual diversities for industrial internet platforms,” Comput. Ind. Eng.,
vol. 156, 2021, Art. no. 107237.
[17] S. Y. Nof and F. Hank Grant, “Adaptive/predictive scheduling: Review
and a general framework,” Prod. Plan. Control, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 298–312,
1991.
[18] I. Sabuncuoglu and S. Goren, “Hedging production schedules against
uncertainty in manufacturing environment with a review of robustness
and stability research,” Int. J. Comput. Integr. Manuf., vol. 22, no. 2,
pp. 138–157, 2009.
[19] L. K. Church and R. Uzsoy, “Analysis of periodic and event-driven
rescheduling policies in dynamic shops,” Int. J. Comput. Integr. Manuf.,
vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 153–163, 1992.
[20] C. Wang and P. Jiang, “Manifold learning based rescheduling decision
mechanism for recessive disturbances in RFID-driven job shops,” J. Intell.
Manuf., vol. 29, no. 7, pp. 1485–1500, 2018.
[21] G. M. Kopanos et al., “Costs for rescheduling actions: A critical issue
for reducing the gap between scheduling theory and practice,” Ind. Eng.
Chem. Res., vol. 47, no. 22, pp. 8785–8795, 2008.
[22] H. Chen, Y. Zhang, and M. Li, “Research on the process optimization of the
production plan in multiple variety and small lot production enterprise,”
Open Cybern. Systemics J., vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 318–323, 2015.
[23] Y. Cheng, Y. F. Xie, D. X. Wang, F. Tao, and P. Ji, “Manufacturing ser-
vices scheduling with supply-demand dual dynamic uncertainties toward
industrial internet platforms,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Informat., vol. 17, no. 5,
pp. 2997–3010, May 2021.
[24] G. Kougka, A. Gounaris, and A. Simitsis, “The many faces of data-centric
workflow optimization: A survey,” Int. J. Data Sci. Analytics, vol. 6, no. 2,
pp. 81–107, 2018.
[25] W. Deng et al., “A novel collaborative optimization algorithm in solv-
ing complex optimization problems,” Soft Comput., vol. 21, no. 15,
pp. 4387–4398, 2017.
[26] W. Li, G. G. Wang, and A. H. Gandomi, “A survey of learning-based
intelligent optimization algorithms,” Arch. Comput. Methods Eng., vol. 28,
no. 5, pp. 3781–3799, 2021.
[27] L. Z. Xu et al., “An intelligent optimization algorithm for blocking flow-
shop scheduling based on differential evolution,” Int. J. Simul. Model.,
vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 678–688, 2019.
[28] D. A. Rossit, F. Tohmé, and M. Frutos, “A data-driven scheduling approach
to smart manufacturing,” J. Ind. Inf. Integration, vol. 15, pp. 69–79, 2019.
[29] P. Priore et al., “Dynamic scheduling of manufacturing systems using
machine learning: An updated review,” Ai E Dam, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 83–97,
2014.
[30] N. Khader and S. W. Yoon, “Adaptive optimal control of stencil printing
process using reinforcement learning,” Robot. Comput.-Integr. Manuf.,
vol. 71, 2021, Art. no. 102132.
Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITY PUTRA MALAYSIA. Downloaded on September 07,2023 at 12:32:00 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
1777
[31] C. Lin, D. Deng, Y. Chih, and H. Chiu, “Smart manufacturing scheduling
with edge computing using multiclass deep q network,” IEEE Trans. Ind.
Informat., vol. 15, no. 7, pp. 4276–4284, Jul. 2019.
Jiawei Ren received the B.S. degree in automa-
tion from the Beijing Institute of Technology, Bei-
jing, China, in 2017, and the M.S. degree in
automation from Sheffield University, Sheffield,
U.K., in 2018. He is currently working toward
the Ph.D. degree in control science and engi-
neering with the School of Automation Science
and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University,
Beijing, China.
His research interests include Digital twin
enhanced smart maintenance and dynamic
scheduling of smart production.
Ying Cheng received the B.S. degree in me-
chanical engineering and automation from the
Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China,
in 2010, and the Ph.D. degree in control sci-
ence and engineering from Beihang University
(BUAA), Beijing, China, in 2016.
She is currently an Associate Professor with
the School of Automation Science and Electri-
cal Engineering, BUAA. She has authored more
than 50 journal or conference papers on the
topics of his research interests, which include
service-oriented smart manufacturing, manufacturing service supply-
demand matching and scheduling, platform-based manufacturing ser-
vice collaboration and operation optimization, and complex system mod-
eling and simulation.
Feng Xiang received the B.S. and Ph.D.
degrees in mechanical engineering from the
Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China,
in 2005 and 2013, respectively.
He is currently an Associate Professor
with the School of Mechanical Automation,
Wuhan University of Science and Technology,
Wuhan. His research interests include digital
twin, service-oriented manufacturing, and green
manufacturing.
Fei Tao (Member, IEEE) received the B.S. and
Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from
the Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan,
China, in 2003 and 2008, respectively.
He is currently a Professor with the School
of Automation Science and Electrical Engineer-
ing, Beihang University, Beijing, China. He has
authored four monographs and more than 100
journal papers in the above areas. His cur-
rent research interests include service-oriented
smart manufacturing, manufacturing service
management, sustainable manufacturing, and digital twin driven product
design/manufacturing/service.
Dr. Tao is currently an Editor of the International Journal of Service
and Computing-Oriented Manufacturing and the Associate Editor of
Robotic and Computer Integrated Manufacturing.