Using Ontology and Semantic Web Tools to Improve New Product Development Process. Towards State of Arts

Abstract

To compete, manufacturing companies need production systems that quickly respond to changes. To handle change drivers such as new product variants, re-configurability is advocated as a competitive means. To address this, New Product Development (NPD) process must be improved. New Product Development is managed by PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) software solutions. Knowledge representation and Ontology enables reasoning and has several advantages in PLM context. This paper proposes a literature review of papers related to the use of ontologies in NPD Process. The goals of this paper are to explore the field of such applications, to figure out the advantages of ontology and semantic Web in an NPD Process and to synthesize major existing Product Ontologies in terms of methodology and structuration. Finally, this paper proposes several research perspectives.