Because of the current trend of integration and interoperability of industrial systems, their size and complexity continue to grow making it more difficult to analyze, to understand and to solve the problems that happen in their organizations. Continuous improvement methodologies are powerful tools in order to understand and to solve problems, to control the effects of changes and finally to capitalize knowledge about changes and improvements. These tools involve suitably represent knowledge relating to the concerned system. Consequently, Knowledge Management (KM) is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage for organizations. Particularly, the capitalization and sharing of knowledge resulting from experience feedback are elements which play an essential role in the continuous improvement of industrial activities. In this paper, the contribution deals with semantic interoperability and relates to the structuring and the formalization of an Experience Feedback (EF) process aiming at transforming information or understanding gained by experience into explicit knowledge. The reuse of such knowledge has proved to have significant impact on achieving the missions of companies. However, the means of describing the knowledge objects of an experience generally remain informal. Based on an experience feedback process model and conceptual graphs, this paper takes domain ontology as a framework for the clarification of explicit knowledge and know-how, the aim of which is to get lessons learned descriptions that are significant, correct and applicable.

Knowledge is nowadays considered as a significant source of performance improvement, but may be difficult to identify, structure, analyse and reuse properly. A possible source of knowledge is in the data and information stored in various modules of industrial information systems, like CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Systems) for maintenance. In that context, the main objective of this paper is to propose a framework allowing to manage and generate knowledge from information on past experiences, in order to improve the decisions related to the maintenance activity. In that purpose, we suggest an original Experience Feedback process dedicated to maintenance, allowing to capitalize on past activities by (i) formalizing the domain knowledge and experiences using a visual knowledge representation formalism with logical foundation (Conceptual Graphs); (ii) extracting new knowledge thanks to association rules mining algorithms, using an innovative interactive approach; and (iii) interpreting and evaluating this new knowledge thanks to the reasoning operations of Conceptual Graphs. The suggested method is illustrated on a case study based on real data dealing with the maintenance of overhead cranes.