Online order scheduling of multi 3D printing tasks based on the additive manufacturing cloud platform

Cloud-based additive manufacturing is one of the important forms of cloud manufacturing service platform, which can match manufacturing resources for multi-task requirements to further improve the utilization of idle resources and achieve cost reductions. This paper proposes a more realistic scenario of online scheduling rather than offline scheduling, in which tasks arrive randomly. According to the scenario, a mixed integer linear programming model of multi 3D printing tasks based on the additive manufacturing cloud platform is constructed, with the goal of minimizing the average cost per volume of material. A heuristic strategy is proposed to solve the problem, and different scale instances are tested to compare the performance. Simulation shows that the proposed algorithm can effectively solve the 3D printing online scheduling problem. •A 3D printing scheduling problem combined with online scheduling is proposed based on the additive manufacturing cloud platform.•A mixed integer linear programming model is formulated to describe the cloud-based 3D printing problem of idle printers with multiple time windows.•A heuristic method is designed to solve the problem, and a wide range of examples are developed for simulation.