Knowledge representation for product and processes development planning in collaborative environments

Abstract

Efficiency in the management of integrated product and processes development is a basic requisite to guarantee competitiveness and success for manufacturing companies. This means that operational management of activities, and human and material resources is extremely important, especially in virtual OKP (One-of-aKind Production) systems, and must cover related aspects of their capabilities and social character as well as assignment criteria. In this context, and to facilitate collaborative resources management, an ontology focused on resources and capabilities is proposed in this work. This ontology supports the necessary knowledge for generic and collaborative process planning, providing a shared common semantic for all the members of the virtual company. This work differs from other proposed ontologies in the area of process planning in that the resources considered are all those elements that participate in the execution of the different activity types involved in this wide and complex process. The ontology directly covers the shared, social nature of the resources, the agentive behavior of many of them and a characterization of their capabilities, thus providing specific solutions to the needs of the Collaborative Integrated Development of Products, Processes and Resources (CIDP 2 R) process.

Knowledge Based Modules for Adaptive Distributed Control Systems

“…Moreover, relevant structural modifications in an agent configuration entail a re-design of the control strategies, which is hard to manage on the fly. In manufacturing, knowledge-based approaches exploiting ontologies have been applied to increase flexibility in modelling and planning of mechatronic devices [36], resources in collaborative environments [37], automation and control systems [38], and to manage information of distinct types [39]. In these cases, planning specifications, if considered, are fixed and neither automatically generated nor subsequently adapted.…”

Modeling Manufacturing Resources: An Ontological Approach

“…Differently, other proposals identify incoming material and/or transformed entities as resources as well [9,10]. 4 Several approaches rely explicitly on the relationship with (manufacturing) processes to characterize the notion of resource (e.g., [12][13][14]), while others complement this approach with the modeling of capabilities [14,15]. According to ISO 15704 [16], for example, a resource is "an enterprise entity that provides some or all of the capabilities required by the execution of an enterprise activity and/or business process."…”

“…8 Second, in line with the engineering literature, we want to make sense of the distinction between (i) resources that 'passively' undergo manufacturing processes, e.g., planks of wood, (ii) resources that 'actively' act on the former, e.g., milling machines, and (iii) resources that result from manufacturing processes, e.g., products. Taking inspiration from IDEF0 9 and previous works [10,14], these correspond in our approach to input, mechanism, and output manufacturing resources, respectively. Differently from the agent vs non-agent dichotomy, the latter notions are not disjoint, since one object can act on itself, i.e., it can be input, mechanism, and output in the same process like a robot changing its configuration.…”

Knowledge representation for missing persons investigations

“…Agrež and Damij (2015) stated that codification of the knowledge within organizational processes can provide the opportunity to overcome some of the limitations of knowledge management in organizational processes that may be uncertain or unstable. Knowledge representation for procedural aspects of an organization’s activities based upon situation calculus has been used in different areas such as manufacturing (Solano et al , 2014), construction (El-Diraby, 2013), business management (Di Ciccio et al , 2015; Weldemariam and Villafiorita, 2011) and health care (Aziz et al , 2013). However, there appears to have been limited research into the use of situation calculus for knowledge representation for police activities (Bosse et al , 2011) and missing persons investigations in particular.…”