Interoperable manufacturing knowledge systems

Abstract

For many years now, the importance of semantic technologies, that provide a formal, logic-based route to sharing meaning, has been recognised 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.

Keywords:

• interoperability
• decision support
• reference ontologies
• manufacturing systems
• knowledge sharing

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the support of the EPSRC in the early research understanding presented in this paper who funded the Interoperable Manufacturing Knowledge Systems (IMKS) under project 253 of the Loughborough University Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC). We also wish to acknowledge the Brazilian Science without Borders programme who supported inputs through the ‘Intelligent Knowledge Libraries: exploiting new ICT technologies for improved Manufacturing Intelligence’ project.