Manufacturing taxonomies and accompanying metadata of manufacturing processes have been catalogued in both reference books and databases on-line. However, such information remains in a form that is uninformative to the various stages of the product life cycle, including the design phase and manufacturing-related activities. This challenge lies in the varying nature in how the data is captured and represented. In this paper, we explore measures for comparing manufacturing data with the goal of developing a capability-based similarity metric for manufacturing processes. To judge the effectiveness of these metrics, we apply permutations of them to 26 manufacturing process models, such as blow molding, die casting, and milling, that were created based on the ASTM E3012-16 standard. Furthermore, we provide directions towards the development of an aggregate similarity metric considering multiple capability features. In the future, this work will contribute to a broad vision of a manufacturing process model repository by helping ease decision-making for engineering design and planning.

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