Deep learning and complex network theory based analysis on socialized manufacturing resources utilisations and an application case study

Abstract

Social manufacturing is characterized by its capability of utilizing socialized manufacturing resources to achieve value adding. Recently, a new type of social manufacturing pattern emerges and shows potential for core factories to improve their limited manufacturing capabilities by utilizing the resources from outside socialized manufacturing resource communities. However, the core factories need to analyze the resource characteristics of the socialized resource communities before making operation plans, and this is challenging due to the unaffiliated and self-driven characteristics of the resource providers in socialized resource communities. In this paper, a deep learning and complex network based approach is established to address this challenge by using socialized designer community for demonstration. Firstly, convolutional neural network models are trained to identify the design resource characteristics of each socialized designer in designer community according to the interaction texts posted by the socialized designer on internet platforms. During the process, an iterative dataset labelling method is established to reduce the time cost for training set labelling. Secondly, complex networks are used to model the design resource characteristics of the community according to the resource characteristics of all the socialized designers in the community. Two real communities from RepRap 3D printer project are used as case study.