Ontological Knowledge Based System for Automotive Assembly Lines

Dynamism and uncertainty are genuine threats for current high technology organisations. Capability to change is the crux of sustainability of current large organisations. Modern manufacturing philosophies, including agile and lean, are not enough to be competitive in global market therefore a new emerging paradigm i.e. reconfigurable manufacturing systems is fast emerging to complement the application of lean and agile manufacturing systems. Product, Process and Resource (PPR) are the core areas in an engineering domain of a manufacturing enterprise which are tightly coupled with each other. Change in one (usually product) affects the others therefore engineering change management activity has to tackle PPR change effects. Current software applications do not provide an unequivocal infrastructure where PPR can be explicitly related. It follows that reconfigurable techniques can be further complemented with the help of knowledge based systems to design, engineer, manufacture, commission and change existing processes and resources against changed products.