ONTOLOGY-BASED FRAMEWORK FOR KNOWLEDGE-BASED LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT OF PRODUCT INFORMATION

One of the major barriers to close the gaps between the academic paradigm of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and the actual potentialities offered by modern PLM implementations in industry is represented by the inherent difficulty in the management of product information structured over a formalized product-related knowledge. This is especially true for complex, highly customized and engineer-to-order products. The amount, the complexity and the variability of the information throughout the lifecycle makes the Product Data Management capabilities inadequate to realize the required level of accessibility. Ontologies and Semantic Web Technologies are a promising solution in addressing the aforementioned challenges relevant to PLM. Despite that, ontologies implementations in real industrial applications remain very limited in number and, in any case, either are restricted to specific areas or tackle the issue from a too general point of view. The paper aims to present a generalized approach to structure a product knowledge domain over a general-purpose, agnostic "base" ontology. It has been developed on top of formal model taken from literature, where the knowledge relative to a complex, highly customized and engineer-to-order (ETO) product from Oil & Gas Turbomachinery industry was formalized in an OWL-DL ontology enriched with SWRL rules and reasoning capabilities. To facilitates the interaction and the validation with the formal model, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been implemented. It enables the penetration of reasoning-enabled ontologies within industrial mindsets and forms the foundations for future integration of the generated product information layer within industrial PLM ecosystems. Within this context, IT asset used to realize the presented proof-of-concept is described and major challenges encountered during the realization and the way they have been tackled are discussed, together with strengths and limitations associated to the approach.