Networked correlation-aware manufacturing service supply chain optimization using an extended artificial bee colony algorithm.

Manufacturing service supply chain (MSSC) optimization has been intensively studied to find an optimal service composition solution with the best quality of service (QoS) value. However, traditional MSSC optimization methods usually assume that candidate services are independent of one another. Therefore, potentially better MSSC solutions may have been neglected by not considering the positive influence of correlations between services on the QoS value. This study proposes a novel networked correlation-aware manufacturing service composition (NCMSC) mathematical model to characterize the influence of vertical and horizontal correlations between services on the QoS value of MSSC solution. To solve the NCMSC model, an extended artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is proposed to find a near-optimal solution with the best QoS value. The specific improvements to the original ABC algorithm include the following: (1) a new matrix-based encoding scheme is proposed to describe the MSSC solution in which each column contains a vertical composite structure and collaborative services for each subtask; (2) the migration operator of a biogeography-based optimization algorithm is combined with the original ABC algorithm to address the discrete MSSC optimization problem and improve the performance of the original ABC algorithm. The results of the experiments illustrate the importance of networked correlations between services, better practicality, effectiveness, and efficiency of the extended ABC algorithm in solving the optimization problem of MSSC.