A framework for planing and solving production problems with manufacturing knowledge reuse

Orders come and go, but production problems (PPs) are forever for manufacturing enterprises. In order to keep high competition in the global product market, the philosophy of continuous finding and solving PPs is never out of fashion to pursuit the ideal “zero defect” goal for today's manufacturing enterprises. To achieve this goal, a framework based on PPs finding and solving to propel production activity state transition efficiently and improving the production competence is presented with three-layer structure made of production activity layer, production problems layer and problem-solving solution layer. Respectively, a production activity chain model is extracted to describe the real production phases in the production activity layer; a production problems layer is formed according to the production activity decomposed into production events triggering concrete problems and those problems are classified into passive production problems and active production problems in accordance with their source; a problem-solving solution layer based on integrating-reasoning-evaluating various manufacturing knowledge including of innovative methods, theories and tools, is outlined and assists the decision makers to make a right choose.