Towards sustainable industry 4.0: A green real-time IIoT multitask scheduling architecture for distributed 3D printing services

As the keystones of the personalized manufacturing, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) consolidated with 3D printing pave the path for the era of Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing. By resembling the age of craft manufacturing, Industry 4.0 expedites the alteration from mass production to mass customization. When distributed 3D printers (3DPs) are shared and collaborated in the IIoT, a promising dynamic, globalized, economical, and time-effective manufacturing environment for customized products will appear. However, the optimum allocation and scheduling of the personalized 3D printing tasks (3DPTs) in the IIoT in a manner that respects the customized attributes submitted for each model while satisfying not only the real-time requirements but also the workload balancing between the distributed 3DPs is an inevitable research challenge that needs further in-depth investigations. Therefore, to address this issue, this paper proposes a real-time green-aware multi-task scheduling architecture for personalized 3DPTs in the IIoT. The proposed architecture is divided into two interconnected folds, namely, allocation and scheduling. A robust online allocation algorithm is proposed to generate the optimal allocation for the 3DPTs. This allocation algorithm takes into consideration meeting precisely the customized user-defined attributes for each submitted 3DPT in the IIoT as well as balancing the workload between the distributed 3DPs simultaneously with improving their energy efficiency. Moreover, meeting the predefined deadline for each submitted 3DPT is among the main objectives of the proposed architecture. Consequently, an adaptive real-time multi-task priority-based scheduling (ARMPS) algorithm has been developed. The built ARMPS algorithm respects both the dynamicity and the real-time requirements of the submitted 3DPTs. A set of performance evaluation tests has been performed to thoroughly investigate the robustness of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results proved the robustness and scalability of the proposed architecture that surpasses its counterpart state-of-the-art architectures, especially in high-load environments.