Low-Carbon Product Family Planning for Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS): Bilevel Optimization with Linear Physical Programming

Abstract

The conversion of manufacturing functional areas towards services implies a paradigm of Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS). It transforms the product fulfillment process to a distributed one via a service-oriented manufacturing platform. Successful MaaS operational planning must be coordinated with low-carbon product family planning (PFP) at the front end of product design and development. These changes challenge the traditional PFP design, considering its manufacturer loading balancing (MLB) problem, which is limited to integrated product fulfillment. This paper proposes a leader–follower interactive decision-making mechanism for distributed collaborative product fulfillment of low-carbon PFP and MLB based on a Stackelberg game. A bilevel optimization model with linear physical programming was developed and solved, comprising an upper-level PFP optimization problem and a lower-level MLB optimization problem. The upper-level PFP aims to determine the optimal configuration of each product variant with the objective of maximizing the market share and the total profit in the product family. The lower-level MLB seeks for the optimal partition of manufacturing processes among manufacturers in order to minimize the low-carbon operation cost of product variants and balance the loads among manufacturers. A case study of WS custom kitchen product family design for MaaS is reported to demonstrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed bilevel interactive optimization approach.