A Formulation for IoT-Enabled Dynamic Service Selection Across Multiple Manufacturing Clouds

Cloud Manufacturing can provide mass manufacturing resources and capabilities as services via the Internet. Undoubtedly, multiple manufacturing clouds (MCs) will have extremely abundant services in terms of function, price, etc. The ability to leverage ample services hosted in MCs has direct relation to the success or failure of a manufacturer. Meanwhile, various uncertainties in today's highly-dynamic business environment can easily disrupt manufacturing activities, rendering original schedules ineffective or even obsolete. IoT's real-time sensing ability can be used to detect those uncertainties. However, little work has been done to take advantage of abundant services from MCs and to effectively deal with uncertainties. In order to address this issue, we propose a mathematical formulation for IoT-enabled dynamic Service Selection (SS) across multiple MCs. We consider three kinds of uncertainties (fluctuation of completion time, choices of manufacturing services, and runtime changes made by users) that come from both the user and market sides. The formulation can guide the dynamic SS and enable users to continuously adjust SS to be more effective and efficient.