Distributed resource environment: A cloud-based design knowledge service paradigm

Abstract

Design can be viewed as a knowledge intensive process, which requires more and more collaboration between design resources within and without an enterprise for product innovation. A company's capacity for product innovation essentially means the ability to discover, use, and manage different kinds of design resources. However, design resources are distributed unevenly within or across organizational boundaries. In order to benefit from the outsourcing of design knowledge within different design resources, with lower costs and within a shorter time, is a great challenge for enterprises. The design knowledge must flow quickly and reliably from when and where it is located to when and where it is needed for design activity. Unfortunately, there are many barriers having a negative influence on quick and reliable knowledge flow between knowledge owners and knowledge demanders. The lack of supporting mechanisms (e.g., a knowledge service platform) between service providers and consumers is one of the barriers. Thus, there is a need to develop mechanisms to overcome the barriers and thereby improve the performance of knowledge flow. This chapter introduces a cloud-based knowledge service environment, i.e., a distributed resource environment, which enables companies to utilize collective open innovation and rapid product development with reduced costs. The definition, function, structure, and characteristics of a distributed resource environment are presented. Then, the concept of a cloud-based knowledge service framework is proposed to organize the knowledge sources in a distributed resource environment. The knowledge sources are composed of design entities' knowledge cloud and resource units' knowledge cloud. The former is the knowledge consumer and latter is the knowledge provider in a distributed resource environment. Next, a cloud-based knowledge service framework is presented for the well effective operation of a distributed resource environment. Two agents, i.e., a knowledge service publishing agent (KSPA) and a knowledge service consuming agent (KSCA) are developed to implement the online knowledge service. KSPA can be used by knowledge providers to encapsulate and publish their design knowledge as a service into the service market, whereas KSCA can be used by knowledge consumers to request knowledge service from the service market. Finally, an inner-enterprise distributed resource environment is implemented to verify the proposed knowledge service paradigm.