The application of common logic based formal ontologies to assembly knowledge sharing

For the last couple of decades, information and communication technologies have been increasingly used to support the decision making in manufacturing organizations. However although these enterprise applications provide increasing amounts of information, they do not support the capture and sharing of multi-perspective knowledge across the participating domains. The aim of this paper is to investigate the capture and sharing of assembly knowledge to support collaboration across the assembly design and assembly process planning domains. In the past there have been some efforts to develop knowledge based systems however these knowledge based systems lack the ability to fully capture and share multi-perspective assembly knowledge. This is because such systems are unable to capture the full meanings and intents of the concepts used to stipulate the assembly knowledge and relationships between these concepts. This paper proposes a mechanism to support capture and sharing of assembly knowledge by using formal ontologies where the latter specify meanings of concepts in computationally interpretable form that consequently provides a base for knowledge sharing. The research concept has been experimentally demonstrated by using a selected set of assembly concepts which have been used to capture and relate assembly design and assembly process planning knowledge.