Analytical target cascading for optimal configuration of production service systems

Product Service System (PSS) advocates an innovative business mode where manufacturers provide products in the form of services instead of mere entity offerings. This mode not only enhances the utilization rate of products and resources, but also improves the service levels throughout the whole product lifecycle. PSS extension to manufacturing environment results in Production Service System (PnSS), which forms a hierarchically organized service- oriented manufacturing alliance composed of manufacturers/suppliers with various production service capabilities to collaborate a customer order. The process of selecting the optimal production service providers for a PnSS is called Production Service System Configuration (PnSSC). It is difficult to apply a centralized optimization method for a PnSSC problem because the members participating into the PnSS are uncertain while most of them are not willing to submit their decision details to the centralized decision model. This paper therefore proposes an Analytical Target Cascading (ATC) based distributed configuration system, atcPortal, for PnSSC. Each service provider models their production capabilities as a web service hosted at local end while published at atcPortal, while the embedded ATC mechanism will coordinate all the related services to formulate the optimal PnSSC for a given customer order. This distributed optimization system avoids centralized modeling and optimization process and thus protects enterprise privacy.