Toward Knowledge Management for Smart Manufacturing

Abstract

The need for capturing knowledge in the digital form in design, process planning, production, and inspection has increasingly become an issue in manufacturing industries as the variety and complexity of product lifecycle applications increase. Both knowledge and data need to be well managed for quality assurance, lifecycle-impact assessment, and design improvement. Some technical barriers exist today that inhibit industry from fully utilizing design, planning, processing, and inspection knowledge. The primary barrier is a lack of a well-accepted mechanism that enables users to integrate data and knowledge. This paper prescribes knowledge management to address a lack of mechanisms for integrating, sharing, and updating domain-specific knowledge in smart manufacturing. Aspects of the knowledge constructs include conceptual design, detailed design, process planning, material property, production, and inspection. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a methodology on what knowledge manufacturing organizations access, update, and archive in the context of smart manufacturing. The case study in this paper provides some example knowledge objects to enable smart manufacturing.

A standards-based approach for linking as-planned to as-fabricated product data

“…We applied the approach in Section 3 for the case study in Feng et al [16] (see Figure 3). This part was provided by an industrial partner and modeled using Siemens NX.…”

“…Comparison of expected and measured X-position for test part with data for features A, B, and C highlighted (after [16])…”

A Standards and Technology Roadmap for Scalable Distributed Manufacturing Systems

“…Needs for cyber-infrastructure integration should include a focus on further extending the digital thread -particularly integrating the elements of the cyber-world depicted in the top portion of Figure 1 while supporting information flow on all the arrows. This area of focus would build upon previous work in the areas of dynamic knowledge-base management, decision support, requirements management, and architectures [16,21,28,29,30]. Research components for extending the previous work on reference architectures should include the use of agents and on-demand micro-services [31,32,33].…”

What is knowledge in Industry 4.0?

“…technologies have coined a concept of manufacturing systems called the fourth industrial revolution (popularly known as Industry 4.0 or smart manufacturing). [3][4][5][6][7][8][9] In Industry 4.0, humans, technology, and organizations are integrated in both horizontal and vertical manners using advanced information and communication technologies. 3,4 The integration must result in some intelligent enables that help achieve the manufacturing tasks through data integration from agile sources.…”