Product design and manufacturing process based ontology for manufacturing knowledge reuse

This paper presents an effective product design and manufacturing process based ontology for manufacturing knowledge reuse. While a number of related efforts exist in the literature, there lacks a granular, interconnected product design and manufacturing process based ontology that can lead to greater industry adoption and knowledge reuse. In particular, the proposed ontology leverages an established industry standard to connect product design and manufacturing process knowledge in a logical and effective manner. The resulting effort is a general ontological framework that can be widely employed by the manufacturing industry. Additionally, the feasibility of implementing the ontology enabled knowledge reuse framework is demonstrated through a real-world case study.