Anne-Françoise Cutting-Decelle

Manufacturing knowledge sharing in PLM: a progression towards the use of heavy weight ontologies

The drive to maximize 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 cross-disciplinary 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 heavyweight 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.

A model-driven ontology approach for manufacturing system interoperability and knowledge sharing

The requirements for the interoperability of semantics and knowledge have become increasingly important in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), in the drive towards knowledge-driven decision support in the manufacturing industry. This article presents a novel concept, based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). The concept has been implemented under the Interoperable Manufacturing Knowledge Systems (IMKS) project in order to understand the extent to which manufacturing system interoperability can be supported using radically new methods of knowledge sharing. The concept exploits the capabilities of semantically well-defined core concepts formalised in a Common Logic-based ontology language. The core semantics can be specialised to configure multiple application-specific knowledge bases, as well as product and manufacturing information platforms. Furthermore, the utilisation of the expressive ontology language and the generic nature of core concepts help support the specification of system mechanisms to enable the verification of knowledge across multiple platforms. An experimental demonstration, using a test case based on the design and manufacture of an aerospace part, has been realised. This has led to the identification of several benefits of the approach, its current limitations as well as the areas to be considered for further work.

Sharing Manufacturing Information and Knowledge in Design Decision and Support

The integration of product design and manufacture has been pursued and advanced for over 20 years. Further advances continue to be pursued in the knowledge that success can lead to significant competitive advantage. This paper provides a contribution to the view that integration through information and knowledge sharing has the potential to offer designers and manufacturing engineers improved decision support based on the provision of high quality information. Our current research into both the definition of manufacturing information and knowledge models and knowledge sharing techniques is explained. Further, the potential for process specification languages to provide improved knowledge sharing is discussed.

Towards the ontology-based consolidation of production-centric standards

Production-centric international standards are intended to serve as an important route towards information sharing across manufacturing decision support systems. As a consequence of the textual-based definitions of the 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 that 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 explored. An important finding regarding these two methods is that while an OWL-based approach shows capabilities towards applications that may require flexible hierarchies of concepts, a CL-based method represents a favoured contender for scoped and facts-driven manufacturing applications.

Extending product lifecycle management for manufacturing knowledge sharing

Product lifecycle management provides a framework for information sharing that promotes various types of decision-making procedures. For product lifecycle management to advance towards knowledge-driven decision support, then this demands more than simply exchanging information. There is, therefore, a need to formally capture best practice through-life engineering knowledge that can be fed back across the product lifecycle. This article investigates the interoperable manufacturing knowledge systems concept. Interoperable manufacturing knowledge systems use an expressive ontological approach that drives the improved configuration of product lifecycle management systems for manufacturing knowledge sharing. An ontology of relevant core product lifecycle concepts is identified from which viewpoint-specific domains, such as design and manufacture, can be formalised. Essential ontology-based mechanisms are accommodated to support the verification and sharing of manufacturing knowledge across domains. The work has been experimentally assessed using an aerospace compressor disc design and manufacture example. While it has been demonstrated that the approach supports the representation of disparate design and manufacture perspectives as well as manufacturing knowledge feedback in a timely manner, areas for improvement have also been identified for future work.

BUILDING SUPPLY CHAIN COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS : A REVIEW OF METHODS AND TECHNIQUES

With the increasing importance of computer-based communication technologies, communication networks are becoming crucial in supply chain management. Given the objectives of the supply chain, supply chain management is situated at the intersection of different professional sectors, each of them with its own vocabulary, its own knowledge and rules. This paper provides a review of the main approaches to supply chain communications through the analysis of different ways of modelling a supply chain and the presentation of new semantic-based approaches that have been and are being developed to improve the quality of the information exchanges within the supply chain.

Towards the understanding of the requirements of a communication language to support process interoperation in cross-disciplinary supply chains

Many manufacturing organizations while doing business either directly or indirectly with other industrial sectors often encounter interoperability problems among software systems. This increases the business cost and reduces the efficiency. Research communities are exploring ways to reduce this cost. Incompatibility amongst the syntaxes and the semantics of the languages of application systems is the most common cause to this problem. The process specification language (PSL), an ISO standard (18629), has the potential to overcome some of these difficulties by acting as a neutral communication language. The current paper has therefore focused on exploring this aspect of the PSL within a cross-disciplinary supply chain environment.  The paper explores a specific cross-disciplinary supply chain scenario in order to understand the mechanisms of communications within the system. Interoperability of processes supporting those communications are analysed against PSL. A strategy is proposed for sharing process information amongst the supply chain nodes using the ‘PSL 20 questions wizard and it is concluded that, although there is a need to develop more effective methods for mapping systems to PSL, it can still be seen as a powerful tool to aid the communications between processes in the supply chain. The paper uses a supply chain scenario that cuts across the construction and manufacturing business sectors in order to provide a breadth to the types of disciplines involved in communication.

Use of Ontology for Solving Interoperability Problems between Enterprises

When trying to solve interoperability problems between enterprises, the semantic issues are important. To date, they are more and more focused on ontology. This paper presents how to use ontology in the PBMEI method, aimed at solving enterprise interoperability problems in modelling environment. During the elaboration of PBMEI, the necessary ontology information is explicitly specified. Because of two different uses of ontologies, this paper proposes two variants of PBMEI. Finally, this paper concludes with the content of the ontologies required in PBMEI. The ontologies in the PBMEI method PBMEI for an application case are being studied.

Organising Manufacturing Information for Engineering Interoperability

Information related to product and manufacturing capabilities are vital for product development. Their related activities utilise a range of software systems. It is therefore important that these software systems should be able to interoperate in order to share information across systems. An initial stage of solving interoperability problems is to understand how this range of information should be classified in order to support the many different contexts of information that are required to support the lifecycle views on product development. Added to this there is a need for clear unambiguous semantics if interoperability is to be achieved effectively. However, a defined vocabulary of terms in one particular context may not be relevant from another context. This requires the definition of the relationships between context semantics to be well understood and defined. This paper explores these problems within manufacturing information systems and discusses the requirements for a methodology to improve the consistency of information sharing and hence interoperability.

ISO 18629 PSL : A STANDARDISED LANGUAGE FOR SPECIFYING AND EXCHANGING PROCESS INFORMATION

Abstract As enterprise integration increases, developers face increasingly complex problems related to interoperability. When enterprises collaborate, a common frame of reference or at least a common terminology is necessary for human-to-human, human-to-machine, and machine-to-machine communication. Ontology engineering offers a direction towards solving the inter-operability problems brought about by semantic obstacles related to the definitions of business terms and software classes. Ontology engineering is a set of tasks related to the development of ontologies for a particular domain. This paper is aimed at presenting the approach of ISO 18629, i.e. the Process Specification Language (PSL), to this problem. In the first part, the architecture of the standard is described, with the main features of the language. Then, the problems of the interoperability with PSL and the conformance to the standard are presented. The paper ends with an example showing the use of the standard for interoperability.