Ontological Modelling of the Aerospace Composite Manufacturing Domain

In recent years, headlines in aerospace engineering news have frequently focused on the large-scale adoption of composite materials in new aircraft programs, as evidenced by the development of the Boeing B787 and the Airbus A350 XWB (Extra Wide Body). The use of composites in aerospace applications has been on a steady rise in the last decades. However, the development of the B787 and the A350 XWB represents a milestone as the major aerospace producers now put their weight behind a whole-hearted switch from predominantly aluminium to predominantly composite structures. From a manufacturing perspective, this is a major step change. One critical aspect of this change is that it imposes the need to create and update existing knowledge bases to adapt industry to this new demand. Converted and newly developed knowledge bases must be supported by the right knowledge structure to ensure that the maximum benefit from the included knowledge is reached; in particular, the capture, sharing, consistent exploitation and re-use of knowledge throughout its life-cycle are important to ensure. To create such a knowledge structure, it is critical to have a solid understanding of the concepts of the attendant domain, as well as the interrelationships and the underlying concept attributes. Ontologies are widely used to model these aspects, resulting in reliable, verifiable and computer-interpretable mappings of a domain. In this paper, a semi-formal ontology is developed which specifically addresses the aerospace composite manufacturing domain; the reported ontology is work in progress. Targeted ontological modeling of the aerospace composite manufacturing domain has not been performed in earlier research (as discussed in Section 2), but would contribute greatly to initiatives for sharing, management and re-use of knowledge in this particular domain. Furthermore, this paper briefly illustrates a case study in which the ontology is used to construct an architecture for a knowledge management (KM) solution. This KM solution aims to deliver knowledge use and re-use benefits to an aerospace OEM, thus validating the ontology approach in practice. To enable the construction of the aerospace composite manufacturing domain ontology, existing perspectives on ontologies and supporting development methodologies are discussed in Section 2. Following this, the ontology construction process is illustrated in Section 3, which includes amongst others the elicitation of concepts, hierarchical structuring, relationship modeling via predicates and implementation in Protégé-OWL. The resulting ontology has been converted and implemented in a knowledge management application, which is elaborated in Section 4. Finally, conclusions, ONTOLOGICAL MODELLING OF THE AEROSPACE COMPOSITE MANUFACTURING DOMAIN