Design knowledge recommendation approach for cloud manufacturing platform based on designer knowledge abilities

Purpose Cloud manufacturing platform has a high degree of openness, with a large variety of users having different needs. Designers on such platforms exhibit great differences in their knowledge abilities and knowledge needs, necessitating the cloud platform to provide personalized knowledge recommendation. To satisfy the personalized knowledge needs of the designers in product design tasks and other manufacturing tasks on a cloud manufacturing platform and provide them with high-quality knowledge resources, a knowledge recommendation method based on designers’ knowledge ability is proposed. The proposed method, with appropriate adjustments, can also be used for personalized knowledge recommendation to other personnel or institutions in cloud manufacturing platforms. Design/methodology/approach A knowledge recommendation method model is developed. The method consists of three stages. First, a designer knowledge system is constructed based on customer reviews in historical tasks, and designer knowledge ability and knowledge demand degree are quantitatively evaluated by synthesizing customer reviews and expert evaluations. Subsequently, the design knowledge domain ontology is constructed, and knowledge resources and tasks are modeled based on the ontology. Finally, the semantic similarity between tasks and knowledge resources and the knowledge demand degree of designers are integrated to calculate the knowledge recommendation coefficient, which realizes the personalized knowledge recommendation of designers. Findings Two design tasks of a 3D printing cloud platform are taken as examples to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with other methods, it is proved that the method proposed in this paper can obtain more knowledge resources that meet the needs of designers and tasks. Originality/value The method proposed in this paper is important for the expansion of data applications of the cloud manufacturing platform and for enriching the knowledge recommendation method. The proposed method has two innovations. First, both designer needs and task needs are considered in knowledge recommendation. Compared with most of the existing methods, which only consider one factor, this method is more comprehensive. Second, the designer’s knowledge ability model is constructed by using customer reviews on the cloud manufacturing platform. This overcomes the defect of low accuracy of the interest model in existing methods and makes full use of the big data of the cloud manufacturing platform.