Ontology for Sustainable Manufacturing: A New Framework for Next Generation Manufacturing

Ontologies, i.e., semantic structures encoding concepts, relations and axioms, providing a model of a given domain, are widely used in different applications, e.g., medical, business, chemical. The main goal in designing and applying ontologies is to enable communication between people and computers/systems, allowing the re-use of knowledge, providing knowledge ordering, structuring and analysis. The essential conceptual structure of the domain of interest should be as general as possible, i.e., domain-independent, in order to improve the readability, reusability, and interoperability of knowledge in the target domain. Current demands and continuing trends in sustainable manufacturing processes justify the interest for an in-depth study of these processes, with particular focus on energy efficiency, resources optimization, operational safety, environmental harnessing and waste minimization. Very little work has been reported on recognizing the importance of structuring and integrating knowledge in the sustainable manufacturing context using ontology. A use-case scenario has been built for a very specific application in manufacturing to give the flavour of the potential future development of such an ontology for sustainable manufacturing. Because of the large variety of potential applications, the proposed analysis has been focused on the drilling process. Drilling is a complex process, affected by several factors. The multiplicity of elements that can influence the drilling, and their reciprocal relationships make difficult a clear interpretation of this process. To overcome this problem and to provide a useful instrument to depict the components that influences drilling, an hybrid approach based on the usage of UML language is thus proposed. An ontological framework has been initially set up to delineate the borders of the system and to identify the key features of the process; then each feature has been described in detail by means of UML. The model allowed to identify critical factors of the drilling, to map the causal relationships among them, and to provide a logical framework for optimization of the drilling process. The formalization of the relevant factors influencing drilling performance in industrial applications, has been validated within an important industrial reality where more than 800 of different drilling operations are performed using more than 100 drilling tools. This validation allowed to appreciate the usefulness of the model as a knowledge repository and an explication method in industrial context