Application of ontology guided search for improved equipment diagnosis in a vehicle assembly plant

In the body shop of an automobile assembly plant, having access to correct and timely diagnostic information is very important for solving equipment and tooling maintenance problems. Variation Reduction Adviser (VRA) is an internal General Motors (GM) system that contains information related to the problems encountered in process, their root cause and possible solutions. This paper presents our work on ontology based diagnosis, where, a thesaurus (which is a simple form of ontology) has been used for retrieving diagnostic information. A thesaurus has been developed from existing problem descriptions and their solutions written in a natural language (such as English). A systematic methodology has been developed for the creation of a thesaurus. The results of ontology based diagnostic information retrieval have been compared with ‘exact match’ information retrieval.