Towards an Expert System for the Manufacturing System Planning of Products With Graded Properties

Abstract

Ontologies open new ways for representing, sharing and reusing knowledge. This paper is based on the investigations within the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) Transregio 30. In the CRC, thermomechanically coupled processes are developed and analyzed. They provide the possibility to produce functional graded components. Functional gradation is the targeted and reproducible adaptation of a material microstructure with the intention of establishing the macroscopic properties of the component. The objective is the steady progress of the microstructure´s variation through at least one spatial dimension. To support the manufacturing system's planning of products with graded properties, we develop an expert system. An expert system is a software which emulates the reasoning of an expert. One of the components of our intended expert system is an ontology. It assists researchers with the use and reuse of the acquired knowledge of the CRC, as well as with communication between the different projects within the CRC. In this paper we explain the architecture of the intended expert system as well as its elements, placing special emphasis on the ontology. Then we explain the ontology´s development based on knowledge extraction and representation.