Process-oriented Semantic Knowledge Management in Product Lifecycle Management

AbstractProduct Lifecycle Management (PLM) focuses on management of product data and processes across their lifecycle stages. One of the key features of PLM is the management of knowledge collected during product development. Reduced time to market, a better collaboration and savings are expected benefits of PLM amongst others. The implementation of a PLM System inside a company can be a hurdle because of the heavy change of the company structure during introduction.Most PLM solutions are based on one integrated product model that stores product data and shares these data with all contributors. However, the access of product data by different expert domains can be challenging when domain expert knowledge is necessary to understand it. This leads to a communication overhead that increases cost, product development time and thus time to market due to the need for contact to experts.To deal with comprehensible knowledge throughout the product lifecycle phases and thereby eliminate communication overhead, this paper presents a process-oriented and integrated semantic solution that supports interoperability of knowledge during all phases of the product lifecycle. Based on shared ontologies and product models, collaborators of product chains have the ability to define their own extensions to the underlying models and ontologies. Collaborators are thus able to use their own modeling methodology, which reduces inhibitions to use the solution. The ability to automatically infer information between partial product models of different process chains enables a better collaboration during product development. Since the access of inferred information for specific process chains can be permitted or restricted, collaboration between multiple departments inside and outside the enterprise is supported.For a better understanding, the solution will be exemplarily applied to the aviation industry. This use case will also be used for evaluation and further improvement. To give a brief outlook on future activities besides PLM, the OSMOSE Project is introduced