On knowledge reuse for manufacturing systems design and planning: A semantic technology approach

This research study deals with the early design and planning of manufacturing systems, following a knowledge reuse approach. The proposed approach introduces a knowledge based framework that facilitates the definition, storage and extraction of knowledge in terms of past production process configurations. The semantic technology and artificial intelligence approaches, such as inference rules and similarity measurement, are the main pillars of the framework. The knowledge based framework is integrated into a greater one, namely, the Virtual Factory Framework that allows for knowledge extraction from data produced by a series of software tools used during the entire factory lifecycle. The concept and the implementation are tested at the early design and planning of a steel fabrication line case study.