Semantic Web Framework for Rule-Based Generation of Knowledge and Simulation of Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

The development of new products and manufacturing systems is usually performed in the form of projects. Frequently, the conduction of the project takes more time than planned due to inconsistency, incompleteness, and redundancy of data, which delays other project activities influencing the start of production (SOP). This paper proposes a semantic Web framework for cooperation and interoperability within product design and manufacturing engineering projects. Data and knowledge within the manufacturing domain are modelled within ontologies applying rule-based mapping. The framework facilitates the generation of new knowledge through rule based inference that enriches the ontology. This enables a high-level model completeness in the early phase of product design and manufacturing system development, which is a basic prerequisite for the realisation of a proper simulation study and analysis. The simulation results can be integrated into the ontologies as a knowledge that additionally extends the ontology.