A Novel Modeling Method of the Crowdsourcing Design Process for Complex Products-Based an Object-Oriented Petri Net

Crowdsourcing design for complex products has open objectives and requires collaboration among different fields. It is difficult to use a single approach to describe the process in which the number and interaction of tasks and steps of tasks are changed dynamically depending on the execution state. Motivated by modeling the collaborative business process of crowdsourcing design in complex products, a crowdsourcing hierarchical process modeling approach based on an object-oriented Petri net is proposed. From the perspective of organization and task, the crowdsourcing object interaction and design process are modeled separately. First, an organization layer modeling approach based on expert review is proposed to describe the information transfer relationship among crowdsourcing objects from the organization perspective. Then, the task layer modeling approach based on the component decomposition idea is proposed. From the perspective of the task, the task is decomposed by using a design structure matrix (DSM) and a product structure tree to model the interaction of the design process. The object-oriented Petri net-is used to realize the representation of the model. Finally, the method is verified by taking the model of the crowdsourcing design of an air cooler as an example. The model subnet is analyzed by means of an overlay tree and incidence matrix, and the reliability and robustness of the model are proven. This method provides a reference for the process modeling of the crowdsourcing design of complex products.