Interoperability in manufacturing by semantic integration

Data for automated manufacturing systems becomes more and more available in digital form. But still it may not be reused throughout all levels of a factory and during the complete life cycle of such systems because of various different machine readable formats and no formalized semantics of the data. Misinterpretations of the data result in inconsistencies, redundancies and a lot of inefficient work and evitable cost. This paper proposes a solution, how information may be read, interpreted and related to other information by using semantic techniques. The presented solution is evolutionary, respects existing heterogeneous semantic concepts and allows a stepwise enrichment of semantic content. Then this refined data may be used for the existing production information systems and as a basis for the digital factory, a concept of a data collection and a comprehensive network of digital models, methods and tools that enable the simulation of a factory in advance without producing physical prototypes.