Intelligent decision-making support system for manufacturing solution recommendation in a cloud framework

Cloud manufacturing represents a valuable tool to enable wide sharing of manufacturing services and solutions by connecting suppliers and customers in large-scale manufacturing networks through a cloud platform. In this context, with increasing manufacturing network size at global scale, the elevated number of manufacturing solutions offered via cloud platform to connected customers can increase the complexity of decision-making, resulting in poor user experience from a customer perspective. To tackle this issue, in this paper, an intelligent decision-making support tool based on a manufacturing service recommendation system (RS) is designed and developed to provide for tailored manufacturing solution recommendation to customers in a cloud manufacturing system. A machine learning procedure based on neural networks for data regression is employed to process historical data on user manufacturing solution preferences and to carry out the automatic extraction of key features from incoming user instances and compatible manufacturing solutions generated by the cloud platform. In this way, the machine learning procedure is able to perform a customer segmentation and build a recommendation list characterized by a ranking of manufacturing solutions which is tailored to the specific customer profile. With the aim to validate the proposed intelligent decision-making support system, a case study is simulated within the framework of a cloud manufacturing platform delivering dynamic sharing of sheet metal cutting manufacturing solutions. The system capability is discussed in terms of machine learning performance as well as industrial applicability and user selection likelihood.