Design of a manufacturing knowledge management system

During the product lifecycle, a large amount of knowledge is generated and has to be stored and make available for re-use. The problem of maintaining a coherent structure to represent the manufacturing knowledge available in companies is crucial, especially for small and medium enterprises, which need to reduce the time to search for particular information to improve their performances. Several tools of product lifecycle management have been developed in the last years to address this issue, but they are rarely exploited by companies, especially SMEs. One of the most promising approaches in scientific research about manufacturing knowledge management is the inclusion of semantic models, both to help the company in organizing and sharing their data, and to allow the easy finding of information and its reuse. The aim of this paper is to describe a knowledge management system to structure and make exploitable the manufacturing knowledge of SMEs. The architecture is based on a ontology model, which is general enough to represent the main concepts and relationships needed to manage the whole manufacturing data, and which can be extended and specialized to manage specific products by adding new entities, sub-entities and relationships to its structure. As a case study, we considered a Romanian manufacturing company, which is interested in adopting a semantic system to manage its production processes. We showed the usage and potentialities of the ontology-based architecture to support the company in organizing data and make them available at each time of the product lifecycle