P-SaaS: knowledge service oriented manufacturing workflow model for knowledge collaboration and reuse*

Orders come and go, but for manufacturing enterprises product-related production problems (PPs) are forever. To realize the aim of CTQS (i.e., lower cost, faster time to market, higher quality and better service), a serviced oriented model of product related problem-solving as a service (P-SaaS) is presented with three-layer structure: task bade workflow layer, knowledge based solution layer and cognition based decision-making layer in this paper. For knowledge oriented PPs solving, each task/subtask is taken as a piece of knowledge service, and the function based task decision for problem solving is organized and implemented by independent Web applications on the microservice architecture platform. Each application is considered as an agent based on its independent function. To support this model, operational models and key enable technologies are detailed. Firstly, a task based workflow is constructed to orchestrate the meta-events of specific task through coordination agent. Secondly, focused on a specific task of PPs query, a similarity based knowledge flow is proposed to retrieve the finite set of alternative solutions with a set threshold value through core agent. Thirdly, a cognition based decision synthesis flow is used to improve the quality of alternative solutions by knowledge collaboration and fusion through the individual agent. Finally, a case on high voltage apparatus in XD company is introduced to validate the proposed models.