Towards Reinforcing Healthcare 4.0: A Green Real-Time IIoT Scheduling and Nesting Architecture for COVID-19 Large-Scale 3D Printing Tasks

With declaring the highly transmissible COVID-19 as a pandemic, an unprecedented strain on healthcare infrastructures worldwide occurred. An enormous shortage in the personal protective equipment (PPE) and the spare parts (SP) for the mechanical ventilators ensued as a consequence of the failure of the centralized global supply chains. Additive manufacturing and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), as the pillars of Industry 4.0, arose as the robust noncentralized alternatives. When gathered and properly managed in the IIoT, 3D Printers (3DPs) can complement and support Healthcare 4.0 to face the current and future pandemics. Thus, this paper proposes a real-time green allocation and scheduling architecture designed and dedicated particularly for the large-scale distributed 3D printing tasks (3DPTs) of both PPE and SPs. Our proposed architecture comprises; a broker (B) and a cluster manager (CM). Dynamic status check for the 3DPs and admission control for 3DPTs are among the interconnected roles of CM. CM also performs task allocation and scheduling according to our proposed Online Ascending Load-Balancing Modified Best-Fit (OALMBF) allocation algorithm and Green Real-time Nesting Priority-Based Adaptive (GRNPA) scheduling algorithm. The performance of the proposed architecture was investigated under extremely high-load environments which resulted in a success ratio and a response rate of 99.9667% and 10.9665 seconds, respectively, for the 3000 3DPTs trial. These results proved the robustness and the scalability of our architecture that surpasses its state-of-the-art counterparts. Besides respecting the real-time requirements of the 3DPTs, the proposed architecture improves the utilization of the 3DPs and guarantees an even workload distribution.