Technology for designing innovative processes for creating products and services of a network enterprise using an i4.0 knowledge-based system

The creation of network enterprises based on the digital technologies of the Industrie 4.0 (the 4th Industrial Revolution, i4.0) opens broad opportunities for increasing production flexibility, customer focus and continuous innovation in products and services provided. At the same time, new opportunities necessitate the development of new methods and technologies for designing innovative processes in the context of digital i4.0 platforms, all of which highlights the relevance of the presented research topic. This work aims to define technologies for designing innovative processes to create products and services using i4.0 systems which are based on multi-agent interaction of asset administration shells (AAS), displaying digital twins of product components, and the use of ontological and cognitive methods for forming and justifying design decisions. The work presented here uses the Domain-Driven Design approach, an architectural framework for building i4.0 systems, methods of ontological engineering, quality function deployment (QFD), analysis of the types and consequences of potential inconsistencies (FMEA) and processing of fuzzy sets. The paper proposes principles for identifying bounded contexts of the domain under the design activities for the stages of the life cycle and products’ subsystems (components). For bounded contexts of the domain, it is envisaged to create AAS of i4.0 systems, with the help of which the innovative process is supported and the multi-agent interaction of its participants is carried out. As cognitive tools for making design decisions, we proposed to use services for assessing the importance of the determined quality characteristics of products and minimizing deviations of the proposed solutions from the formed functional and non-functional requirements. The methods of ontological engineering and data modelling allow us to dynamically develop an innovative project and support various versions of the project in the design process. Application of the proposed technology for designing innovative processes to create products and services at network enterprises using i4.0 systems will improve the quality of design decisions, increase the dynamism and continuous design of innovative projects.