Ontology-based model for production-control systems interoperability

One of the emerging control problem in manufacturing systems is the "information interoperability (I2)" problem: information is required to be coherent and congruent with the specific use, particularly in interfacing manufacturing processes, at any stage of the product lifecycle management. Lack of comprehension, misunderstandings as well as redundant activities are typically signs of I2 problems. Standardisation initiatives, in the frame of ISO and IEC (IEC 62264), try to answer these problems by specifying the information related to products, manufacturing resources and processes. These represent the most assessed corpus of knowledge for business to manufacturing (B2M) applications interoperability, available so far for studying and solving the I2 issues. This paper tries to trace a path for studying the I2 problems in production-control systems, by a formalisation procedure to build an ontology-based model, based on the IEC 62264 standard.