Integrated Workforce Allocation and Scheduling in a Reconfigurable Manufacturing System Considering Cloud Manufacturing

The reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) has been acknowledged as an effective manufacturing paradigm to tackle high volatility in demand types and amounts. However, the reconfiguration needs an amount of time and leads to some level of resource wastage. Accordingly, a high frequency in the system's reconfiguration may have a negative impact on its performance. In this regard, this paper investigates the advantage of using cloud manufacturing (CMfg) resources in enhancing the performance of an RMS system. A novel mathematical model is developed for the integrated workforce allocation and production scheduling problem utilizing the CMfg under a non-permutation flow shop setting. This model simultaneously makes decisions on the utilization of the CMfg capacity for performing some jobs, and for the remaining jobs, determination of machines' configurations for each job, scheduling of the jobs on the machines, and allocation of operators to machines as well. This model aims to minimize the sum of job processing costs, overtime costs, and the cost of utilizing the CMfg resources. Finally, a computational experiment is conducted, which shows a promising improvement in the total cost of the production system by utilizing the CMfg capacity.