Towards Knowledge-Based System to Support Smart Manufacturing Processes in Aerospace Industry Based on Models for Manufacturing (MfM)

The Product design and manufacturing of an Airplane is complex and requires the involvement of multiple experts sharing information and knowledge from multi-perspectives within and across institutional boundaries. From the Fourth Industrial Revolution, new concepts are emerging like smart manufacturing, which is a convergence of modern enabling technologies with artificial intelligence to increase manufacturing efficiency and eliminating pain points, ensuring higher quality levels and customization. Models for Manufacturing (MfM) is a recent methodology that presents an organization to formally defined information and knowledge. However, MfM does not consider information tracking and inconsistencies analysis across the PLM phases. Based on this context, this research explores the proposal of a Product Design and Manufacturing Knowledge-based system (PDMKBs) based on MfM and Semantic Web Technologies. PDMKBs is composed of 4-layers: ontology layer; semantic resolution & alignment layer; Application & Analysis Layer and Data Layer. OWL and Semantic rules are used to formalize the information and knowledge and to share, convert or translate information from multiple perspectives to infer the relation between multiple product design and manufacturing levels. The PDMKBs was tested in the tooling design to manufacturing a sheet metal part of the A400M. The main research contributions are: (i) the well-defined structure to formalize heterogeneous information and knowledge; (ii) the improvement of information and knowledge exchange between heterogeneous domains across different phases of the manufacturing process.