The Industrial Ontologies Foundry proof-of-concept project

The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler. Ontology-based information standard may provide benefits not offered by current information standards. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been fragmented and inconsistent, and little has received a standard status. With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and financial domains, an effort called Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain. However, developing a coherent ontology covering the entire industrial manufacturing domain has been known to be a mountainous challenge because of the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing. To manage the scope and expectations, the IOF community kicked-off its effort with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. This paper describes the developments within the project. It also provides a brief update on the IOF organizational set up

The Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) Core Ontology

The Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) was formed to create a suite of interoperable ontologies. Ontologies that would serve as a foundation for data and information interoperability in all areas of manufacturing. To ensure that each ontology is developed in a structured and mutually coherent manner, the IOF has committed to the tiered architecture of ontology building based on the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as top level. One of the critical elements of a successful tiered architecture build is the domain mid-level ontologies. However, thus far there has been no mid-level manufacturing ontology that is based on BFO. The IOF has recently released the IOF Core version 1 beta to fill this gap. This paper documents the development process and gives an overview of the current content of the IOF Core. Finally, the paper describes how the IOF Core can be used as the basis for a more domain-specific Supply Chain Ontology

The Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) perspectives

In recent years there has been a number of promising technical and institutional developments regarding use of ontologies in industry. At the same time, however, most industrial ontology development work remains within the realm of academic research and is without significant uptake in commercial applications. In biomedicine, by contrast, ontologies have made significant inroads as valuable tools for achieving interoperability between data systems whose contents derive from widely heterogeneous sources. In this position paper, we present a set of principles learned from the successful Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry initiative to guide the design and development of the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF), which is a counterpart to the OBO Foundry initiative for the manufacturing industry. We also illustrate the potential utility of these principles by sketching the conceptual design of a framework for sustainable IOF development

Advances in Production Management Systems: Issues, Trends, and Vision Towards 2030

Since its inception in 1978, the IFIP Working Group (WG) 5.7 on Advances in Production Management Systems (APMS) has played an active role in the fields of production and production management. The Working Group has focused on the conception, development, strategies, frameworks, architectures, processes, methods, and tools needed for the advancement of both fields. The associated standards created by the IFIP WG5.7 have always been impacted by the latest developments of scientific rigour, academic research, and industrial practices. The most recent of those developments involves the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is having remarkable (r)evolutionary and disruptive changes in both the fields and the standards. These changes are triggered by the fusion of advanced operational and informational technologies, innovative operating and business models, as well as social and environmental pressures for more sustainable production systems. This chapter reviews past, current, and future issues and trends to establish a coherent vision and research agenda for the IFIP WG5.7 and its international community. The chapter covers a wide range of production aspects and resources required to design, engineer, and manage the next generation of sustainable and smart production systems.acceptedVersio

TOWARDS THE SYNTHESIS OF PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE ACROSS THE LIFECYCLE IMECE2013-65220

ABSTRACT Product lifecycle management is an important aspect of today's industry, as it serves to facilitate information exchange and management between most, if not all, stages of a product's existence. As exchanged product information is inevitably subjected to multiple transformations and derivations, information transparency between lifecycle stages can be difficult to achieve. Synthesizing representations of product information across the lifecycle, by creating a lifecycle-stageindependent platform, can provide transparent access to information for both upstream and downstream applications. In this paper, we review previous and ongoing efforts using ontologies as a means to support information integration and interoperability throughout the lifecycle of a product. We propose that existing efforts can be leveraged to create an upper-tiered ontology for product information. The resulting ontology, a core model for product lifecycle information, would support the synthesis and exchange of product information across lifecycle stages, improving access to this information and facilitating lifecycle thinking. We discuss the use of ontologies as a means to create and link paradigm-independent representations. We discuss the translations that product information may face when integrated through ontologies, and the extent to which the integrity of the information can be preserved across the lifecycle. We investigate the role of information quality in the exchange and evolution of product information across the lifecycle. Finally, we discuss the application of an upper-tiered ontology, particularly the advantages offered by increased transparency and interoperability, as a means to support lifecycle thinking for mitigating a product's sustainability impact. LEVERAGING PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT The product lifecycle connects distinct stages of a product's existence across a lifespan. Common expressions used to refer to the span of the product lifecycle are "cradle to grave" and "cradle to cradle." Each of these refers to the lifespan of a product beginning at conception and finishing at "end of life," where end of life may be disposal or renewal, through means such as recycling or remanufacturing. Traditionally, lifecycle management techniques have allowed companies to reduce costs by organizing and dissipating product-specific information at different stages of a lifecycle In today's industry, advances in information management systems such as PLM have allowed manufacturers to better communicate with their supply chain, within their own companies, and across lifecycle stages. The capacity to which information can be managed across lifecycle stages is influenced by the accessibility of product information at each stage. As information becomes more accessible, the ability to manage information across the lifecycle increases. Significant factors that influence the accessibility of information across th

Content-Level Conformance Testing: An Information Mapping Case Study

Abstract. Content-level conformance testing is a key to achieving interoper-able data exchange among applications deployed across collaborating, yet in-dependent enterprises. In this paper, we identify four types of content-level conformance tests to support interoperable data exchange: document-verification tests, information-mapping tests, transaction-behavior tests, and scenario-based tests. We describe in substantial detail our experience with in-formation-mapping tests within an industrial B2B integration effort. We review different approaches to information-mapping conformance verification includ-ing logical consistency checking, human-computer interaction, and event-based checking. We adopt the human-computer interaction approach and describe a test-case generation methodology. The methodology details modeling, test re-quirements specification, abstract test-case definition, and, ultimately, executa-ble test-case generation. Lastly, we provide experimental results of applying our methodology in the context of an automotive industry development of data exchange standard for interoperable inventory visibility applications.