A new client coordination approach is developed for cloud manufacturing (CMfg). The recent research outcome is published in European Journal of Operational Research on March 2019. EJOR publishes high quality, original papers that contribute to the methodology of operational research (OR) and to the practice of decision making. EJOR is ranked as 4* on the new International ABS journal ranking list (very few journals are ranked 4*, the highest category), and it was an A on ERA list.
The major contribution of the research presents client coordination approach enabling clients to coordinate with each other for the exchange and reutilization of their booked resources in CMfg. Via client coordination cost savings are derived from the post-optimization of the initial uncoordinated solution of all clients at the planning horizon.
The research also addresses the optimization problem under client coordination, which is a service booking and scheduling problem, being proved to be strong NP-hard. Optimal solution algorithms based on dynamic programming are proposed for two common cases. Considering the selfishness of each client, we develop a cooperative game for client coordination and propose a core cost savings allocation scheme with which every client can get benefits through coordination in order to form a grand coalition.

 
Figure 1. Cloud manufacturing paradigm

If you are interested in the research, please cite this article as:
Chen J, Huang G Q, Wang J Q, Yang C (2019). A cooperative approach to service booking and scheduling in cloud manufacturing. European Journal of Operational Research, 273(3): 861-873.
A full version of this article could be viewed at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221718307537