Knowledge Sharing and Reuse in Potential Failure Mode and Effects Analysis in the Manufacturing and Assembly Processes (PFMEA) Domain

The Potential Failure Modes and Effects Analysis in Manufacturing and Assembly Processes (PFMEA) represents an important preventive method for quality assurance, in which several specialists are involved in the investigation of all the causes and effects related to all possible failure mode of a manufacturing process, still in the initial phases of its development. Thus, the decisions based on the severity levels of effects and on the probabilities of occurrence and detection of the failure modes can be planned and prioritized. The result of this activity consists of a valuable source of knowledge about the manufacturing processes. However, this knowledge is hardly reusable in intelligent retrieval systems, because in general all related information is acquired in the form of natural language and it is not semantically organized, and therefore its meaning depends on the understanding of the specialists involved in the production chain. In this context, this paper describes the development and implementation of a formal ontology based on description logic (DL) for the knowledge representation in the domain of PFMEA, which fundamentally intends to allow the computational inference and ontology-based knowledge retrieval as support to the activities of organizational knowledge in manufacturing environments with distributed resources.