Knowledge fusion among the virtual production enterprises within the technology information infrastructure environment

With the practical application of the Internet technology in the production industry, it is very natural to link a group of enterprises through the network. When linking the heterogeneous enterprises through the network, it is very important to share the appropriate knowledge among them at the appropriate time. The method of acquisition, representation, storage, exchange, sharing, transformation, and re-use of knowledge among the heterogeneous enterprises should be thoroughly discussed prior to linking the enterprises through the network. In order to solve these problems, a strategic project has been started in Japan from the participations from both industries and academics. It is the VIPNET (Virtual Production Enterprise Network) project under the novel IMS (Intelligent Manufacturing System) program. This strategic project aims at linking the virtual production enterprises through a network, where all enterprises can exchange and share the knowledge with the help of the appropriate network infrastructure. In this project, we are focusing on establishing the technological information infrastructure. This infrastructure is expected to support the life cycle activities of the production enterprises, such as the research and development, process design, production, distribution, marketing, sales, maintenance, and even the disposal of any production plant. The main topics included in this project are information modeling technology, flexible hardware or software, data warehousing technology, intelligent agent technology, ontology technology, and so on. A real nuclear power plant in Japan and its life cycle activities are used as experimental materials in order to verify the effectiveness of our concept and approaches. This paper describes the overall concept and current progresses of the project as well as our prior achievement regarding this project.