Management of Experience Knowledge in Continuous Production Processes

The extrusion of rubber profiles, as used for automotive production, is a highly complex continuous production process which is strongly influenced by variability in input materials and other external conditions. The personal experience of the production line operators continues to play an important role here, as analytical models exist only for small parts of such processes, and systems for automatic control can only provide basic functionality. In the MErKoFer project, knowledge about extrusion processes is captured by ontology-based traceability mechanisms for both direct process support of extrusion operators, and for process analysis and improvement based on the integrated application of data mining techniques. The knowledge accumulated this way assists in ensuring defined quality standards and in handling production faults efficiently and effectively. The approach was experimentally implemented and evaluated at the industrial partner’s site, and some generalizable parts of the environment were taken up by the software house partner in their aiXPerience software environment for process automation and process information systems.