Modeling manufacturing resources: An ontological approach

Abstract

Resource management is at the core of different manufacturing tasks, which need to be seamlessly integrated to optimize production in manufacturing environments. The development of knowledge-based systems led to the use of ontologies to systematically organize data. Unfortunately, ontologies for resource knowledge representation lack maturity and often rely on context-dependent modeling choices. As a result, the notion of manufacturing resource is treated in disparate, non-homogeneous ways at the expenses of communication and application systems interoperability. The purpose of the paper is to lay down a conceptual framework on manufacturing resources based on ontology engineering principles. By the end of the paper we will see how different approaches can be harmonized with the proposed approach.