With highly increased competition, intelligent product manufacturing based on interpretable knowledge bases has been recognized as an effective method for building applications of explainable Artificial Intelligence that is the hottest topic in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The success of product family directly depends on how effective the viability mechanisms are laid down in its design. In this paper, a systematic cloud-based set of tool family is proposed to develop viable knowledge-based systems. For productive participation of domain and cognitive specialists in manufacturing, the knowledge base should be declarative, testable and integratable with other architectural components. Mechanisms to ensure KBS viability are provided in an ontology-oriented development environment, where each component is formed in terms of domain ontology by using the adaptable instrumental support. Due to the explicit separation of ontology from knowledge, it became possible to divide competencies between specialists creating an ontology and specialists creating a knowledge base. We rely on the fact that the activity of creating an ontology is significantly different from the activity of creating a knowledge base. Creating an ontology is a creative process that requires a systematic analysis of the domain area in order to identify common patterns among its knowledge.The characteristic properties of knowledge-based systems related to viability are described. It is explained, how these properties are provided in development environments implemented on cloud platform. The concept of a specialized manufacturing environment for knowledge-based system is introduced. The necessary set of tools for such ontology-oriented environment construction is determined. The example of tools for creating specialized manufacturing environments is the instruments implemented on the «IACPaaS» platform. The IACPaaS is already used for collective development of thematic cloud knowledge portals with viable knowledge-based systems. This specialized manufacturing environment has enabled the creation of multi-purpose medical software services to support specialist solutions based on knowledge being remotely improved by experts.
