Semantic tool interoperability for engineering manufacturing systems

Manufacturing systems engineering projects depend on contributions from several engineering disciplines. These contributions consist of complex artifacts like mechanical, electrical, and software components and plans. While the software tools are strong in supporting each individual engineering discipline, there is very little work on engineering processes automation across semantically heterogeneous engineering tool data models. In this paper, we adapt the Engineering Knowledge Base (EKB) concept, a semantic model, which extends the Global-as-View concept and explicitly models common engineering concepts and mappings using machine-understandable syntax, for the engineering of manufacturing systems. We evaluate the concept based on a real-world use case for data exchange between software tools involved in the engineering of a manufacturing system software simulator. Major result is that the EKB concept sufficiently supports the semantic interoperability of tools to enable the automation of engineering processes.