A dynamic order acceptance and scheduling approach for additive manufacturing on-demand production

Additive manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D printing, has been called a disruptive technology as it enables the direct production of physical objects from digital designs and allows private and industrial users to design and produce their own goods enhancing the idea of the rise of the “prosumer”. It has been predicted that, by 2030, a significant number of small and medium enterprises will share industry-specific AM production resources to achieve higher machine utilization. The decision-making on the order acceptance and scheduling (OAS) in AM production, particularly with powder bed fusion (PBF) systems, will play a crucial role in dealing with on-demand production orders. This paper introduces the dynamic OAS problem in on-demand production with PBF systems and aims to provide an approach for manufacturers to make decisions simultaneously on the acceptance and scheduling of dynamic incoming orders to maximize the average profit-per-unit-time during the whole makespan. This problem is strongly NP hard and extremely complicated where multiple interactional subproblems, including bin packing, batch processing, dynamic scheduling, and decision-making, need to be taken into account simultaneously. Therefore, a strategy-based metaheuristic decision-making approach is proposed to solve the problem and the performance of different strategy sets is investigated through a comprehensive experimental study. The experimental results indicated that it is practicable to obtain promising profitability with the proposed metaheuristic approach by applying a properly designed decision-making strategy.