Development of a Manufacturing Ontology for Functionally Graded Materials

Abstract

The development of manufacturing technologies for new materials involves the generation of a large and continually evolving volume of information. The analysis, integration and management of such large volumes of data, typically stored in multiple independently developed databases, creates significant challenges for practitioners. There is a critical need especially for open-sharing of data pertaining to engineering design which together with effective decision support tools can enable innovation.We believe that ontology applied to engineering (OE) represents a viable strategy for the alignment, reconciliation and integration of diverse and disparate data. The scope of OE includes: consistent capture of knowledge pertaining to the types of entities involved; facilitation of cooperation among diverse group of experts; more effective ongoing curation, and update of manufacturing data; collaborative design and knowledge reuse.As an illustrative case study we propose an ontology focused * Address all correspondence to this author.on the representation of composite materials focusing in particular on the class of 'Functionally Graded Materials' (FGM) in particular. The scope of the ontology is to provide information about the components of such materials, the manufacturing processes involved in creation, and diversity of application hanging from additive manufacturing restorative dentistry. The ontology is developed using Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and parts of the Ontology for Biomedical Investigation (OBI). NOMENCLATURE INTRODUCTIONInformation management encompassing the lifecycle of acquisition, curation and dissemination of material data have posed significant challenges in both academic and industrial domains. Over the years, relevant communities have accumulated ever larger amount of scientific data, and this accumulation has created a shortfall in effective information management. Improving this effectiveness is the key to obtaining better results in both research and development.Typically, data about materials science and engineering relates to four elements: composition of the material produced, properties of these materials, processing, performance in finished products [1,2].Oftentimes materials science data, of the sorts analysed by the scientists, are stored in multiple, autonomous, distributed, and heterogeneous sources, codified in different, and in many cases incompatible, formats often in the form of raw data obtained from lab instruments acquisition and or from measures of performance of basic properties, like corrosion data or fatigue data.A less discussed (but perhaps more critical) challenge is the semantic inconsistency of explicit and shared information as between different users and different applications [3,4]. Different aspects of this problem have to be considered, including: different ways of classification of materials due to different scopes, semantic discrepancy of synonyms and homonyms, different representation of similar data. Further comprending this matter is the fact that ...

Enriching the functionally graded materials (FGM) ontology for digital manufacturing

“…Responding to a call for proposals from the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII) CUBRC and the University at Buffalo initiated the Coordinated Holistic Alignment of Manufacturing Process (CHAMP) project [31] with the goal of creating a flexible suite of interoperable generic public-domain ontologies covering the design, manufacturing, testing process, maintenance and tool domains. Through the CHAMP project, the Product Life Cycle Ontologies were created, and the FGMO 2.0, a revision of the FGMO [2] (named as FGMO 1.0 after this point onward) was developed as potential contribution to the IOF framework.…”

“…The mid-level is modeled on the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) [35]. Furini et al [2] detail the FGMO 1.0, which covers FGM research in the area of components, manufacturing processes, material properties, and applications, focusing on the domain level to include low-level classes related to directly to FGM research [36] [37] [38].…”

“…An ontology is used to provide a common information structure that can support interoperability across heterogeneous data. The FGM Ontology (FGMO) [2] was introduced to counteract some of the effects of the lack of alignment and the resultant poor discoverability of FGM research data by providing a controlled, structured vocabulary, that could be used to tag such data consistently along the lines pioneered by ontology initiatives in other areas. The FGMO is designed to serve not only to provide the basis for more systematic information management but also to support the use of computational tools to reason with extracted FGM information.…”

An ontological approach to representing the product life cycle

“…17 One early example of the use of BFO in the industrial domain is provided by the OBO Ontology for Biomedical Investigations, the idea for which was first sketched by Whetzel, (2006), and more specifically in the OBI Materials Transformation branch, which deals with inputs and outputs of processes such as blending, mixing, staining, and so forth (Bandrowski et al 2016). This part of OBI was used in the development of an ontology for functionally graded materials (Furini et al 2016).…”

Visual Analytics Tools for Sustainable Lifecycle Design: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Opportunities

“…The expectations of the IOF is to enable similar opportunities for the engineering community. Interested readers can refer to initial work from Furini et al [192] that provides a BFO-based ontology for functionally graded materials. Structured taxonomic representations, such as those presented by Kumaraguru et al [193], also expedite the prototyping of visual representations, as shown by Li and Bernstein [194].…”