What ontologies for PLM: A critical analysis

Abstract

Product development environments are known for their growing complexity, especially if they are envisioned for the whole product Iifecycle. The objective of the PLM business activity is to manage products across their Iifecycles, from cradle to grave. PLM is focused on the product, and holistically brings together many product-related components. For such environments, ontologies could play an important role to ensure semantic interoperability and correct information exchange. But what kinds of ontologies are best suited to fulfil this task.The work presented in this paper overviews some of the prominent ontologies used in product development and explores the usefulness of some typical known ontologies for PLM needs. The ontologies are assessed with respect to some ontology engineering and PLM key criteria. By identifYing positive and negative aspects with respect to the previous criteria, we clarifY the range of alternatives in creating an ontology devoted to PLM purposes. KeywordsPLM ontologies, product knowledge management, semantic interoperability 1 IntroductionOne of the biggest challenges in product development of extended enterprises is the huge amount of information that is used and its great diversity. How could such environments make sense of product knowledge and use it in the most effective way. Product lifecycle management (PLM) is recognized as one of the key leading technologies to facilitate companies to overcome these challenges. PLM is the business activity of managing an organization's products all the way across their lifecycles in the most effective way [Bourke 2004]. PLM systems ensure that up to date information are available and accessible for the right people in the right format at the right time.The potential benefits of a PLM system for such environments are hindered by the immense amount of product knowledge involved and the lack of a mechanism to manage it conveniently. Ontologies are considered nowadays as key elements for successful information exchange and semantic interoperability among people and machines in complex environments. They act as shared vocabularies for describing the semantic related to relevant notions of a certain application area. Hence, they could be used to alleviate these problems. So far, relatively few studies concerning the use of ontologies for PLM were reported; section 2 deals with the motivations that led to the idea of using ontologies in PLM. The main objective of this paper is twofold: (1) to summ arize the most important research efforts that use an ontological approach for ensuring semantic interoperability in product development and PLM, this is dealt with in section 3 (2) to study typical ontologies among the most known and to explore how they could be exploited for PLM needs, in section 4. Section 5 presents some important applications of this study and finally, section 6 concludes this work by stating the most important results and a range of alternatives in creating ontologies devoted to PLM purposes.

Taskradar: Task Visualisation and Monitoring Within Automotive Product Development Lifecycle Using Semantic Technologies

“…Enquiry on existent works [14] about ontologies and formal approaches [6,12,13,16] [7,8] are covering only partially our needs. They are upper level ontologies with insuficient granular precision required to describe resources in our use case.…”

Complexity Measurement of Product Models

“…maintenance statistics. Ontologies have been considered as basis for PLM models (Mostefai & Bouras 2006) (Borsato u. a. 2010).…”

Extending product lifecycle management for manufacturing knowledge sharing

“…Thus, the IMKS approach allows the derivation of specialised knowledge bases as repositories for designers and planners alike, without the need to commit to a fixed master model. In that sense, the heavyweight ontology dimension of this work builds on top of the current perceived advantages of applying formal ontologies within a PLM context to aid the process of semantic interoperability and knowledge exchanges [3,6,7,16,17].…”

“…The contribution by Kesavadas et al [28] acknowledges the use of formal ontologies to progressively capture design and manufacturing concepts. Other authors [17,29,30] have identified the potentials of using upper level and core ontologies from which to relate PLM structures. Unfortunately, these approaches either still lack the level of semantic rigour or need to be further explored in order to be industrially viable.…”

“…The exploration of ontology-driven PLM systems is a relatively recent research area [17] but is quickly gaining consideration both at research and industry level. Earlier work [5,19,20] has shown that the shift towards ontology-based approaches can start to support the capture of semantics of product data and various types of product features.…”