Towards a Formal Ontology to Support Interoperability Across Multiple Product Lifecycle Domains

Abstract

The advancements in computer systems have led to the replacement of various traditional manual manufacturing activities with Information & Communication Technology (ICT) tools. In a highly competitive world, it is imperative for different manufacturing systems to have interoperability in order to aid better, faster and cheaper production. However, different manufacturing domains have different data structures, syntaxes and semantics which lead to problems in interoperability and knowledge sharing. Interoperability issues can potentially be resolved if a computationally interpretable ontology can provide a basis for common understanding across different manufacturing domains. Although researchers have proposed manufacturing ontologies, the number of manufacturing domains addressed and the formalization have been limited. Research work is required to develop a formal core manufacturing ontology that supports various product lifecycle domains. This paper proposes a formal Product Lifecycle Ontology (PLO) to facilitate interoperability across multiple product lifecycle domains. The proposed ontology is semantically enriched comprising of core concepts, relations and axioms. The ontology is aimed at supporting interoperability not only across different manufacturing domains but also across different time frames. The proposed ontology contributes towards a reference manufacturing ontology that expands previous works and fills in the research gaps that exist within the area of formal manufacturing reference ontologies.