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 light-weight ontologies and goes on to discuss the potential for heavy-weight 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.
Abstract:The capture of manufacturing best practice knowledge in product lifecycle management systems has significant potential to improve the quality of design decisions and minimise manufacturing problems during new product development. It should both support manufacturing engineers and offer designers an improved ability to understand the manufacturing consequences of alternative design options. However, providing a re-useable source of manufacturing best practice is difficult due to the complexity of the viewpoint relationships between products and the manufacturing processes and resources used to produce them. This paper reports on an industrial exploration of this problem combined with the application of modelling methods which support the capture of relationship knowledge during system design.The paper discusses the analysis of a number of component products and their manufacturing methods in order to identify how best to organise manufacturing best practice knowledge, the relationships between elements of this knowledge plus their relationship to product information. The representation of such complex relationships during system design typically causes problems as traditional system design tools such as UML do not readily support the capture of other than simple relationships between different information classes. This paper also explores the application of UML-2 as a system design tool which can model these relationships and hence support the reuse of system design models over time.The paper identifies a set of part family and feature libraries and, most significantly, the relationships between them, as a means of capturing best practice manufacturing knowledge and illustrates how these can be linked to manufacturing resource models and product information. The viewpoint relationships between part families and features are captured during system design using UML-2 thereby supporting the long term re-use of the knowledge as systems are developed and new systems come on line. Design for manufacture and machining best practice views are used in the paper to illustrate the concepts developed. An experimental knowledge based system has been developed and results generated using a power transmission shaft example.
Production--centric international standards are intended to serve as an important route towards information sharing across manufacturing decision support systems. As a consequence of textual--based definitions of concepts acknowledged within these standards, their inability to fully interoperate becomes an issue especially since a multitude of standards are required to cover the needs of extensive domains such as manufacturing industries. To help reinforce the current understanding to support the consolidation of production--centric standards for improved information sharing, this article explores the specification of well--defined core concepts which can be used as a basis for capturing tailored semantic definitions. The potentials of two heavyweight ontological approaches, notably Common Logic (CL) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) as candidates for the task, are also exposed. An important finding regarding these two methods is that while an OWL--based approach shows capabilities towards applications which may require flexible hierarchies of concepts, a CL--based method represents a favoured contender for scoped and facts--driven manufacturing applications.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.