Reusing knowledge based on Ontology and Organizational Model

Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 2017

This paper presents an effective product design and manufacturing process based ontology for manufacturing knowledge reuse. While a number of related efforts exist in the literature, there lacks a granular, interconnected product design and manufacturing process based ontology that can lead to greater industry adoption and knowledge reuse. In particular, the proposed ontology leverages an established industry standard to connect product design and manufacturing process knowledge in a logical and effective manner. The resulting effort is a general ontological framework that can be widely employed by the manufacturing industry. Additionally, the feasibility of implementing the ontology enabled knowledge reuse framework is demonstrated through a realworld case study.

Journal of Engineering Design (Taylor & Frnacis), 21: 4, pp. 427 — 454, First published on: 27 September 2008 (iFirst), 2010

The article presents the research of the nature, building and practical role of a Design Ontology as a potential framework for the more efficient product development (PD) data-, information- and knowledge- description, -explanation, -understanding and -reusing. In the methodology for development of the ontology two steps could be identified: empirical research and computer implementation. Empirical research has included domain documentation analysis (Genetic Design Model System, Mortensen 1999), identification of the key concepts and relations between them, and categorisation of the concepts and relations into taxonomies. As an epistemological foundation for the concepts formalisation, The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) proposed by IEEE, was reused. As the result of the previously described process, the ontology content has been categorised into six main subcategories divided between physical and abstract world. As a next step the computer thesaurus has been created. Using the thesauri, the knowledge evolved during the PD has been described, and the set of the created concepts and relations instances has been used for the ontology model consistency checking and refinement. The Design Ontology was evaluated through test product examples and based on this evaluation and proposed implementation framework further research steps are proposed.

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2011

The aim of this paper is to build an ontology of organizations. This ontology will be used to analyze, reason and understand organizations. The targeted organizations are those composed of individuals involved in the design of a product and, to do so, following a design process. This ontology will be used to support knowledge management within the described organizations. More specifically, the ontology will provide means for reasoning, annotating resources, monitoring design processes, enabling searches and proactively proposing tips and proper content. The presented approach is based upon the use of an existing organizational metamodel, namely CRIO, already used for the description of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) organizations. In our case, the concepts of this metamodel are used to model human activities.

In today’s world there is ever increasing pressure to bring products to market in a quicker and more timely fashion that fulfill customers’ needs and are delivered on budget. One way to aid such acceleration of the design and development process is to effectively share and reuse manufacturing knowledge in an effort to bring about product based interoperability. This paper reports upon the work being carried out in the SAMULET research programme that addresses such factors. It focuses upon (i) how the sources of information and knowledge were recognized, (ii) the definition and categorisation of knowledge and (iii) the potential routes for the reuse of manufacturing knowledge. The research approach is currently being developed to help augment a supportive information and knowledge sharing environment and bring about a more integrated development process within a high tech aerospace company.

The study illustrated in this paper aims at analyzing the knowledge management issue related to product development. Especially, the focus is on the domains in which Knowledge- based Systems (KBE) and Design Automation (DA) tools could be adopted.In the past various studies, a lot of KBE and DA systems have been developed in multiple fields such as automotive, aerospace, energy, materials and manufacturing: the information treated in these studies are about data relatives to specific design, for example, of automotive engine compo- nents, aircraft structures, energy plants, advanced material and manufacturing or assembly lines. In all of these domain the organization and formalization of the knowledge is a critical issue. The adoption of a good strategy to manage data and information relative to products and processes involves benefits in the product development process. Different methodologies are described in literature.The two of the most used are the Object-Oriented (OO) and Ontology Engineering (OE) approaches. The former is one of the most common and adopted in the industrial domain, including a lot of implementations in the recent past years. The latter is more commonly used in other fields, like bio-engineering, used with the scope of man- agement of experimental data; few implementation in industrial engineering have been considered. brief description of the state of the art about Knowledge Based The article considers a ∗Address all correspondence to this author. †Address all correspondence to this author. Engineering and Ontology Engineering. A case studies will be described and the benefits and disadvantages due to the use of the different methodologies will be discussed.

Advanced Engineering Informatics, 2015

Knowledge-based engineering (KBE) approaches are designed to reduce the time and cost of product development by capturing, retaining and re-using design knowledge. They currently focus on repetitive design tasks where knowledge is considered as a static resource. However, knowledge is intrinsically linked to the organizations and people who use it. Thus, to be efficient, these knowledge-based systems (KBS) have to be able to take into account all the mechanisms of knowledge creation, sharing and evaluation made by the users. Using the agent paradigm, new knowledge-based systems can be designed in order to address this research issue. Indeed, the agents have social abilities and are able to achieve very complex tasks. These two features are necessary for making a knowledge-based system efficient. However, there still exists today a lack of approaches and methodologies to help design such applications. This paper presents DOCK, a methodology to design an intelligent knowledge-based system that aims to support the knowledge management process. In order to take into account all the mechanisms of knowledge generation, sharing and re-use, DOCK is based on the hypothesis that efficient modelling of human organizations, by highlighting their roles, collaborations, skills, goals and knowledge, will help the KBS designer to specify an adapted knowledge-based system. Finally, DOCK is implemented to design the SMA SNOTRA that is dedicated to supporting a decision-making process for design projects.

Expert Systems with Applications, 1998

Completion of complex engineering designs (e.g. the design of offshore oil platforms, ships, etc.) often involves a number of agents who have to share or reuse design models within a distributed environment. This paper presents a knowledge sharing workbench which enables agents to share common domain knowledge, based on the problems which emerge in the design process. The workbench includes Application Programming Interfaces provided by expert system shells, an Object Request Broker, and a number of ontologies to facilitate the construction of new knowledge-based systems. In addition, the distributed knowledge acquisition tools generated by the workbench can maintain model consistency between agents when specification changes occur in any of the agents. A case study from the petrochemical industry is used to illustrate the use of workbench for the integration of a number of agents. This case study demonstrates that a process flow knowledge model in an offshore petrochemical plant, designed for operational purposes (e.g. fault diagnosis), can be reused to form part of a new knowledge-based system which generates the data for plant layout design. ᭧

International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2006

This paper discusses the theoretical aspects and applications of a novel methodology for exploiting a knowledge management editor tool to structure organisational knowledge and integrate it with product development activities. An organisational knowledge framework for capturing and representing manufacturing know-how has been developed using an ontological approach. The captured knowledge is converted into the industrystandard eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) and then shared within a web-centric Product Data Management (PDM) system to support a collaborative and distributed product development environment.

This paper presents a knowledge management experiment realized in an industrial company. Our research concerns the development of a project memory to capitalize Information and Knowledge created, shared and reused in a product design project. The project memory is based upon a domain ontology called OntoDesign which enables to easily exploit it. This is implemented with the Semantic Web technologies in order to provide a framework for the annotation and the reuse of knowledge. This article describes the design rationale of OntoDesign.

Computer-Aided Design and Applications, 2008

Product knowledge support needs are compared in two companies with different production volumes and product complexity. Knowledge support requirements identified include: function, performance data, requirements data, common parts, regulatory guidelines and layout data. A process based data driven knowledge reuse method is evaluated in light of the identified product knowledge needs. The evaluation takes place through developing a pilot case with each company. It is found that the method provides more benefit to the high complexity design domain, in which a significant amount of work takes place at the conceptual design stages, relying on a conceptual product representation. There is not such a clear value proposition in a design environment whose main challenge is layout design and the application of standard parts and features. The method supports the requirement for conceptual product representation but does not fully support a standard parts library.