SIMPM – Upper-level ontology for manufacturing process plan network generation

Abstract Distributed computer integrated manufacturing is increasingly adopting cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and multi-agent systems as steps towards “design anywhere, build anywhere” strategy. In this scenario, ontologies not only serve as common message exchange structure among distributed agents but also provide reasoning capability to extract implicit knowledge from explicit information already stored in the knowledge base. Foundation ontologies (upper-level), comprised of most general concepts of a domain, provide a common semantic structure to the domain-level ontologies, which capture details of multi-disciplinary manufacturing knowledge. In this paper, novel upper-level ontology, called SIMPM (Semantically Integrated Manufacturing Planning Model), is proposed in order to model three fundamental constraints of manufacturing process planning: variety, time, and aggregation. The philosophical underpinning of the proposed ontology – presented as OWL-DL axioms – is derived from a three dimensional planning model, developed during our past research on computer-aided process planning. As part of the evaluation of SIMPM ontology, we first expound on the interoperability issues with other upper-level manufacturing ontologies. Next, we present a case study on process planning for prismatic part design. In this way, we demonstrate how the generic set of proposed axioms may be used to address various manufacturing process planning concerns, such as alternative manufacturing resources, the temporal order among operations and granularity in the details of a process plan.