Ontology-Based Maintenance Decision Support System for Electric Equipment Condition Data and Application Cooperation

In electric utilities, condition-based assets management and maintenance decisions involve a great deal of information and analysis tools, residing in different systems. This situation is further intensified by online condition monitoring practice. These data sources maintained by different institutions differ in semantics, structure, organization, query capabilities, forming a distributed, heterogeneous information resources. This paper proposes an ontology-based heterogeneous information management and cooperation architecture for decision support. Firstly, we model application domain knowledge structure by analyzing equipment condition data and application software entity in detail, develop a top level domain ontology. Secondly, based on the semantic data model, we deploy a distributed semantic information processing architecture to support information organization, effective retrieval and web-based search for information resources of user interested. The paper describes the distributed physical and four-layer logical architecture in detail. The core technology requires an global ontology management system and semantic web service techniques, where ontologies assist in information discovery and subsequent use, semantic Web service handle interface and data heterogeneity.