A Preliminary Method to Support the Semantic Interoperability in Models of Manufacturing (MfM) Based on an Ontological Approach

Abstract

The product design and manufacturing complexity have been increased in the last few years. This has challenged the manufacturing industry to rationalise different ways of bringing to the market novel products in a short lead-time with competitive prices while ensuring higher quality levels and customisation. Design and Simulation systems bring to the product developer experts an abstraction required for the design of complex products. However, for a complex product manufacturing process has required simultaneously collaborations with multiple groups, producing and exchanging information from multi-perspectives within and across institutional boundaries. Thousands of different information must be exchanged across heterogeneous systems. Semantic interoperability obstacles have been identified in view of the information heterogeneity from multiple perspectives and their relationships across different phases of product manufacturing. In this context, this paper presents a preliminary method for Models for Manufacturing (MfM) to support the semantic interoperability across the manufacturing system based on reference ontologies, application ontologies and semantic rules. The MfM has been modelled in reference ontologies and specialised to perform multiple specific applications according to the product to be manufactured. Semantic rules are used to share, convert or translate information from multiple perspectives in order to infer the relation between multiple manufacturing levels. The main research contributions are: (i) the intelligence structuring information in elementary concepts responsible for representing the MfM, modelled in the core ontologies (Reference Ontologies) and (ii) the improvement of information exchanging (translation, conversion and sharing) from heterogeneous domain across different phases of manufacturing process based on the semantic rules.