Knowledge Sharing Between Design and Manufacture

Journal of Manufacturing Systems, 2011

Potential Failure Modes and Effects Analysis in Manufacturing and Assembly Processes (PFMEA) is an important preventive method for quality assurance, and through it the decisions based on the severity levels and probabilities of occurrences and detection of the failure modes can be planned and prioritized, seeking to improve the quality of the manufactured products. This activity generates a valuable source of knowledge about the manufacturing processes in the company. However, the sharing and reuse of this knowledge is a challenge, because usually the knowledge is not semantically organized, and therefore its meaning depends on the understanding of the specialists involved. Also, there is a high fragmentation and distribution of knowledge along the production chain. Considering this scenario, this paper presents the development of a system for distributed knowledge sharing and reuse in the PFMEA domain using an ontology based on description logics, which intends to allow knowledge inference and retrieval in manufacturing environments with distributed resources. The results show that the proposed approach is adequate to support knowledge sharing and reuse, allowing: (a) knowledge representation and organization; (b) distributed knowledge inference and retrieval; (c) management of organizational knowledge on manufacturing environments with distributed resources.

International Journal of Production Research, 2007

The drive to maximise the potential benefits of decision support systems continues to increase as industry is continually driven by the competitive needs of operating in dynamic global environments. The more extensive information support tools which are becoming available in the PLM world appear to have great potential but require a substantial overhead in their configuration. However, sharing information and knowledge in crossdisciplinary teams and across system and company boundaries is not straightforward and there is a clear need for more effective frameworks for information and knowledge sharing if new product development processes are to have effective ICT support. This paper presents a view of the current status of manufacturing information sharing using lightweight ontologies and goes on to discuss the potential for heavyweight ontological engineering approaches such as the Process Specification Language (PSL). It explains why such languages are needed and how they provide an important step towards process knowledge sharing. Machining examples are used to illustrate how PSL provides a rigorous basis for process knowledge sharing and subsequently to illustrate the value of linking foundation and domain ontologies to provide a basis for multi-context knowledge sharing.

Design Computing and Cognition '14, 2015

The design process for large systems, e.g., industrial plants, involves large multidisciplinary teams. Since each discipline has its own specialised concerns, the common thread is describing the functional requirements of an artefact. In the oil and gas industry, Engineering, Procurement & Construction (EPC) companies are responsible for designing industrial plants whose later use requires exchange of information which is often based on different formats and leads to huge costs due to interoperability overhead. One contender in this space is the ISO15926 standard used for industrial design data interchange. We examine several challenges the standard poses for the conceptual and detailed design phases, and provide an alternative framework grounded on a firm ontological foundation incorporating advanced modelling concepts such as multi-level models and roles that provide a basis for the effective development of meta-model mappings, a novel approach for organisations needing to map to ISO15926.

2010

This paper presents a proposal enabling the modelling of manufacturing processes independently of the structure and composition of the industrial plant where these processes will ultimately be implemented. The rationale for the proposal is in the incorporation of knowledge, supported by ontologies regarding manufacturing processes, industrial machinery and the industrial plants involved. With this knowledge, process engineers can focus their efforts exclusively to define the activities to be performed on the raw material (abstract model), allowing the system to infer what other activities should be incorporated in the abstract model to obtain a particular manufacturing process tailored to a particular industrial plant. To refine the proposal, a case study is put forward in which the management system was able to infer the way for the raw material to be processed according to the abstract model and automatically composed the activities necessary for achieving it. Finally, an implementation of this management system for processes is presented together with the design of two models of industrial plant that demonstrate the validity of our proposal.

2011

This paper proposes a manufacturing core concepts ontology (MCCO) aimed at providing support for product life cycle interoperability. The potential focus of the work is interoperability across the production and design domains of product lifecycle. A core set of manufacturing concepts and their key relationships are identified in MCCO. Semantics are captured formally through heavyweight logic using rigorous rules and axioms.

IFIP — International Federation for Information Processing, 2008

The aim of the present paper is to introduce a feature-based Product-Process-System model and ontology in order to retrieve and share knowledge for simulation of manufacturing systems. Product knowledge is the combination of product specific information, such as functionality, colour and product variants, and the corresponding product model. The model provides understanding of the product structure, rules, constraints and assembly-specific information in relation to the product model. In the design and modeling of assembly processes, features form the foundation for analysis and knowledge acquisition of the product. This knowledge includes geometric and non-geometric information. In the present paper, an approach is proposed to share platform independent product-process knowledge between the assembly process and system design and even with the simulation environment.

International Journal of Production Research, 2017

For many years now, the importance of semantic technologies, that provide a formal, logic based route to sharing meaning, has been recognized as offering the potential to support interoperability across multiple related applications and hence drive manufacturing competitiveness in the digital manufacturing age. However, progress in support of manufacturing enterprise interoperability has tended to be limited to fairly narrow domains of applicability. This paper presents a progression of research and understanding, culminating in the work undertaken in the recent EU FLEXINET project, to develop a comprehensive manufacturing reference ontology that can (a) support the clarification of understanding across domains, (b) support the ability to flexibly share information across interacting software systems and (c) provide the ability to readily configure company knowledge bases to support interoperable manufacturing systems.

Advanced Engineering Informatics, 2012

This paper proposes an approach for facilitating systems interoperability in a manufacturing environment. It is based on the postulate that an ontological model of a product may be considered as a facilitator for interoperating all application software that share information during the physical product lifecycle. The number of applications involved in manufacturing enterprises may in fact refer to the knowledge that must be embedded in it, appropriately storing all its technical data based on a common model. Standardisation initiatives (ISO and IEC) try to answer the problem of managing heterogeneous information scattered within organizations, by formalising the knowledge related to product technical data. The matter of this approach is to formalise all those technical data and concepts contributing to the definition of a Product Ontology, embedded into the product itself and making it interoperable with applications, thus minimising loss of semantics.

Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, 2011

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to address the capture and documentation of essential design for manufacture (DFM) pieces of information to make design decisions. Essential manufacturing information is that which can affect the fulfilment of functional requirements and product constraints. The hierarchical structure of the main components for the open architecture-process planning model (PPM), manufacturing activity model (MAM) and manufacturing resource model (MRM) are discussed The aim of the approach is to define manufacturing knowledge structures and develop a knowledge-based application for DFM. Design/methodology/approach -This work addresses the capture and documentation of essential DFM pieces of information to make design decisions. Essential manufacturing information is that which can affect the fulfilment of functional requirements and product constraints. The hierarchical structure of the main components for the open architecture-PPM, MAM and MRM are discussed. The aim of the approach is to define manufacturing knowledge structures and develop a knowledge-based application for DFM. Findings -This paper gives details of the application framework development by integrating object-oriented technology and component-based development. This will help to achieve large-scale software reuse for manufacturing application development projects. This paper also gives an overview of a computer system for automated concurrent engineering, and more particularly, to a method for the concurrent design of parts, tools and processes. Originality/value -The workability of this approach was tested in a machine-tool manufacturing firm and the same has been presented as a case.

International Journal of Production Research, 2011

Problems related to knowledge sharing in design and manufacture, for supporting automated decision-making procedures, are associated with the inability to communicate the full meaning of concepts and their intent within and across system boundaries. To remedy these issues, it is important that the explicit structuring of semantics, i.e. meaning in computation form, is first performed and that these semantics become sharable across systems. This paper proposes a Common Logic-based ontological foundation as a basis for capturing the meaning of core feature-oriented design and manufacture concepts. This foundation serves as a semantic ground over which design and manufacture knowledge models can be configured in an integrity-driven way. The implications involved in the specification of the ontological foundation are discussed alongside the types of mechanisms that allow knowledge models to be configured. A test case scenario is then analysed in order to further support and verify the researched approach.