An Ontological Approach to Consolidate Standards-Based Concepts in Production Engineering

International standards define a range of concepts which can be applied across manufacturing enterprises in the effort towards a reusable vocabulary for information exchange. In many cases the textual definitions of these concepts pose a barrier towards information sharing in a formal manner. Moreover, although data models have been defined in standards to help formalize relevant concepts and their relationships within given manufacturing contexts, these models are not sufficiently rigorous to ensure system interoperability. In this paper, we analyze an ontology-based methodology as a route to expressively capture the semantics of concepts for improved interoperability. The approach uses a Common Logic-based underpinning which is used to define core concepts that apply to a generic set of production-centric standards. The method also supports the ability to specialize core concepts into more specific definitions, in order to target focused viewpoints. This then leads to the identification of an ontological perspective for the best practice organization of manufacturing information with a slant onto a part family and feature understanding.