Building and Applying Shipbuilding Ontology for BOM Data Interoperability in Heterogeneous Shipbuilding PLM Systems

Shipbuilding is a complex industry which contains a lot of knowledge, technology, and utilities. Hence, the necessity of the PLM (Product Life-cycle Management) system which manages life-cycle information of marine product has been increased. So, many studies related to shipbuilding PLM have been preceded, and there are some cases to be built. To implement collaboration and concurrent engineering of ship designing and manufacturing, interoperability of product data in heterogeneous system is required. Also, sharing and reusing knowledge are important for innovation of business process and productivity of enterprises. Even though many studies related interoperability of product data are going on in varies domain, the application to shipbuilding is deficient. This paper proposes a methodology for management and interconnection of BOM data based on ontology in heterogeneous PLM system of shipbuilding. Using Protg-OWL, we built simple domain ontology of shipbuilding industry, and then, we integrated product information of shipbuilding BOM which is represented with different ontologies. We verified possibility of integration of shipbuilding BOM in heterogeneous PLM, using ontology.