Integrating information over the life-cycle of manufacturing equipment by assigning semantics

Abstract

With semantic web technologies being in the focus of manufacturing systems designers in recent years, different possibilities to facilitate plant processes have been analyzed. This paper takes a look on existing approaches and compares these with the demands that are given when dealing with automated information integration between different layers of the factory architecture and different phases of the equipment Lifecycle.In order to integrate information, the approach of semantically connecting different communication standards is considered. As a conceptual tool to fulfill the demands given, the use of ontologies, especially the Web Ontology Language OWL, is proposed. Finally, an idea for meeting the difficulties with heterogeneous shop floor ontologies is motivated.

Towards an automated generation of device firmware components for intelligent field devices

“…for purposes of documentation and life-cycle sensitive information storage, an integration ontology can be employed in order to combine the semantic knowledge from both ontologies. Integration ontologies are a tool for information integration in automation scenarios, explained in [11]. They carry the potential to take specialized ontologies and leverage their semantic connotations to a higher level, where they can be combined with the connotations from another ontology.…”