Task allocation in manufacturing: A review

Task allocation (TA) problem is of critical importance in manufacturing industry, and determines the effectiveness and efficiency of advanced manufacturing systems. A proper TA approach can give an optimized arrangement of existing resources, enable manufacturing system's flexibility, thus improve both economic performance and social benefits. However, there is still no uniform analysis on TA to date, while it has been paid more attention from the view of manufacturing resource allocation. With the application of advanced information and manufacturing technologies, the TA process improved with intelligence or even smartness could respond to demand changes rapidly and maintain a good balance for supply-demand matching issues. In this paper, TA and its intelligent improvements are picked and investigated. The general workflow of TA is divided into six stages: task description and modelling, analysis and modelling of TA process, algorithm design and selection for TA, decision-making of TA, simulation, and task execution. Each stage is separately analyzed at first. In particular, the decision-making process of TA consists of two approaches: the traditional way of system-oriented process (SoP), and the task-oriented process (ToP). Researches show that the latter one can better suit current systems and their manufacturing environment. At last, future directions of TA are pointed out to make systems achieve much more intelligence.