An Ontology Approach to Collaborative Engineering For Producibility

With today’s high product variety and shorter life cycles in automobile manufacturing, every new car design must be adapted to existing production facilities so that these facilities can be used for the manufacturing of several car models. In order to ensure this, collaboration between engineering design and production engineering has to be supported. Sharing information is at the core of collaborative engineering. By implementing an ontology approach, work within domains requirement management, engineering design, and production engineering can be integrated. An ontology approach, based on an information model implemented in a computer tool, supports work in the different domains and their collaboration. The main objectives of the proposed approach are supporting the formation of requirement specifications for products and processes, improved and simplified information retrieval for designers and process planners, forward traceability from changes in product systems to manufacturing systems, backward traceability from changes in manufacturing systems to product systems, and the elimination of redundant or multiple versions of requirement specifications by simplifying the updating and maintenance of the information.