Ontological Knowledge Based System for Product, Process and Resource Relationships in Automotive Industry

This paper provides solutions to the real industrial need of adding knowledge layer to commercial PLM systems. PLM systems can be enhanced to be used as Knowledge Management tools to solve the semantic interoperability problem of heterogeneous data. Large amounts of product and machine component data exists in under-utilised databases due to the inability of existing integration approaches to systematise and relate the available information. The information about products, processes and resources is managed in PLM systems but it is not linked relationally among each other for complex decision making purposes. With the help of ontologies, knowledge based services serve a new layer of manufacturing management. The main objective of PLM as a KM tool is to improve the capabilities of technology intensive organisations to monitor and respond to technological and product changes and fully utilise the information stored in PLM systems through explicit mapping among products, processes and resources.