ROMAIN: Towards a BFO compliant reference ontology for industrial maintenance

In this paper, we present a domain-specific, open access, reference ontology (ROMAIN) for the maintenance management domain. We use a hybrid approach, based on a top-down alignment to an open source top-level ontology, the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), and a bottom up focus on classes that are grounded in maintenance practice. We constrain the scope of the ontology to the classes that are unique to the maintenance management practice, such as maintenance strategy, degradation, and work order management, rather than modeling the entire domain of maintenance. This approach reduces the scope of the development task and enables reasoning to be tested at a manageable scale. ROMAIN provides a unifying framework that can be used in conjunction with other BFO compliant sub-domain ontologies, such as planning and scheduling ontologies. The proposed ontology is validated using real-life data in the context of a use case related to evaluating the effectiveness of maintenance strategy.