Foundation Ontology for Distributed Manufacturing Process Planning

Distributed computer integrated manufacturing is increasingly adopting cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and multi-agent systems as steps towards “design anywhere, build anywhere” strategy. In this scenario, foundation ontologies not only serve as common message exchange structure among distributed agents but also provide reasoning service to extract implicit knowledge from explicit information already stored in the knowledge base. Foundation ontologies, comprised of most general concepts of a domain, provide a common semantic structure to the domain-level ontologies, which capture details of multi-disciplinary manufacturing knowledge. In this paper, foundation ontology for manufacturing process planning is proposed and manufacturing process selection information of a sample prismatic design feature is modeled using the proposed foundation ontology, as a case study.