Multi-aspect ontology for semantic interoperability in PLM: Analysis of possible notations

Abstract

Product lifecycle management covers a number of stages that deal with different tasks and apply different methods but require intensive information exchange to be efficient. Information support of these stages has to address this problem. However, successful implementation of information support systems requires solving the problem of interoperability of heterogeneous information related to different PLM stages. The paper investigates the problem of developing a single ontology for PLM support taking into account differences between terminologies (multi-aspect ontology) used at various stages of the PLM cycle. Different options of designing ontologies covering multiple domains have been considered. Three of them: (i) ontology localization/multilingual ontologies (ii) granular ontologies, and (iii) ontologies with temporal logics are considered in details and analysed. The analysis is based on the case study of PLM support at the automation equipment producer Festo AG & Co KG.