An evolutionary game approach for manufacturing service allocation management in cloud manufacturing

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) is emerging as an advanced service-oriented manufacturing model for the manufacturing industry. In CMfg system, manufacturing service allocation plays an important role in facilitating high quality service management. In order to adapt the decentralized decision-making management of manufacturing service allocation in practice, a multi-user oriented manufacturing service allocation framework is proposed in this paper. And an evolutionary game model is developed from population perspective to observe the allocation tendency of different manufacturing services. Manufacturing service allocation with evolutionary game theory can provide fairness among users. In addition, replicator dynamics is used to model the strategy adaptation process of different users. We prove that the evolutionary game model is able to converge to the equilibrium, and specially analyze the stability of evolutionary equilibrium for two manufacturing services game. Then, the strategy iteration for population users is implemented by simulation algorithm. Numerical experiments are conducted to validate our theoretical findings and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Some managerial implications drawn from the results can help CMfg platform operators to make better service allocation decision in the future.