A Cloud Manufacturing Resource Allocation Model Based on Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Resources should be allocated efficiently in a cloud manufacturing environment, given specific cloud manufacturing task. We study on the optimal resource allocation after the qualitative analysis of the match between the tasks and the resources in this work. Along this line, many factors should be significant, including time, cost and quality of services. Moreover, the workload of equipments should also be considered, in order to achieve load balance and improve the efficiency of manufacturing and the productivity. Therefore, in this paper, based on a four-dimensional objective function, that is, time, cost, quality of services and the load balance, we adapt the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm to find the optimal solution. We also present a case study to evaluate our model.