Cloud manufacturing service evaluation based on modular neural network

In order to solve the evaluation problem of cloud manufacturing service and then minimise the time of choosing the best service, a comprehensive evaluation index system of cloud manufacturing services is constructed in the light of the characteristics of cloud manufacturing service. The service attributes, manufacturing attributes and network attributes are taken into account from two views of the online characteristics and the offline characteristics of cloud manufacturing service in the evaluation index system. And on this basis, a quantitative evaluation model based on modular neural network (MNN) is proposed. Firstly, the clustering algorithm subtractive-k-means is introduced and used to divide the task into several subtasks based on the idea of modularisation. Then, the subtasks are processed through the trained BP network. Finally, the self-adaptive genetic algorithm is used to optimise the integration weights of each subtask processing module. Combining with the cloud manufacturing evaluation index system, this modular neural network model can be used to effectively evaluate the cloud manufacturing service and help customers quickly select the best cloud manufacturing service. Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.