An Ontology-Based Concept to Support Information Exchange for Virtual Reality Design Reviews

Abstract

The current change of traditional products towards intelligent, connected cyber-physical systems (CPS) increases the amount of heterogenous data and models generated throughout the products' life cycle stages, starting from their development and reaching as far as reconfigurations in the product use phase. As CPS are highly modular and often customizable by the user, the management and decision support regarding product variants is critical. Mastering the vast complexity of these product-type and product-instance-related information has become one of the main challenges in modern engineering.In previous works, the authors presented different mixed reality (MR) approaches as suitable tools to integrate product-related information and facilitate the interaction with digital contents such as product manufacturing information (PMI) and inspection characteristics for design reviews or real-time sensor values to support maintenance tasks.This contribution proposes an ontology-based concept to facilitate the information exchange from distributed data sources for mixed reality usage and vice versa. The goal of this paper is to improve the information provision and interaction within a collaborative Virtual Reality-driven design review process for CPS. The ability of ontologies for querying and reasoning of linked information supports the comparison of design variants and feedback integration from design reviews of previous or existing product generations as well as allocating relevant design review metrics such as requirements, simulation results, costs or product use data. The capability of CPS to call upon services from other Industrie 4.0 components opens up a way to implement said ontology to meet today's engineering challenges.

Open Source Control Device for Industry 4.0 Based on RAMI 4.0

“…These applications emphasize the need for a unified and standardized information model, and they can be mapped through RAMI 4.0 layers. Reference [31] describes the use of the asset administration shell in the integration layer to structure virtual components in virtual reality applications. The OPC UA address space in the communication layer can also be used to provide interoperability for these applications.…”