A novel complex manufacturing business process decomposition approach in cloud manufacturing

Abstract

In cloud manufacturing, manufacturing business processes are virtualized and encapsulated into manufacturing services. Enterprises can customize their manufacturing business applications on cloud manufacturing platform. To facilitate the customization, a global manufacturing business process is generally built and transformed into a feature model. However, since most global manufacturing business processes have a large number of nodes and complex dependency relationships, it is difficult to transform them into feature models. Therefore, we propose a novel complex manufacturing business process decomposition approach in cloud manufacturing. The approach is beneficial to construct a desired feature model. Firstly, combined with the domain engineering theory, the complex manufacturing business process customization approach in cloud manufacturing is elaborated. Secondly, the complex manufacturing business process decomposition approach is proposed. A global manufacturing business process network (GMBPN) is constructed according to the input and output relationships of manufacturing business activities. Based on the GMBPN, a two-phase decomposition algorithm is presented. In the community detection phase, the nodes in the GMBPN with functional similarity are clustered into the same community with an adaptive strategy. In the sub-process reconstruction phase, the corresponding sub-process is reconstructed in each community. We evaluate the decomposition algorithm with an actual elevator design business process. Experimental results show the proposed algorithm is effective to find the optimal decomposition results.