Research on the impact of service provider cooperative relationship on cloud manufacturing platform

As an emerging service-oriented manufacturing paradigm, Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) is expected to provide smart networked platforms that enable efficient global collaborations among cloud service providers in a product lifecycle. The service provider cooperative relationship (SPCR) plays a crucial part in cloud service scheduling and thus potentially influences the operational performance of a CMfg platform. The guaranteed SPCR could ensure service quality and reduce the interaction costs among service providers in the process of collaborative manufacturing tasks, thereby having a positive impact on the operational efficiency of a CMfg platform. The cost reduction and quality assurance, however, usually make the cost-effective services more attractive for an increasing number of manufacturing tasks and lead to load imbalance in a CMfg platform, thus having a negative impact on the operational efficiency. The impact mechanism of SPCR on a CMfg platform is still unclear from an evolutionary perspective. In this paper, we propose a CMfg platform evolution model (CPEM) to investigate the impacts of SPCR on the operational performance of a CMfg platform. Three quantitative metrics, from the perspective of cloud consumer, cloud operator, and cloud service provider, respectively, are established to support the performance evaluation. The results of contrast experiments reveal the impacts of SPCR on a CMfg platform.