Product-Assembly Planning Ontology for Integrating Product Design and Assembly Process Planning (APP)

This paper presents a semantic approach to support knowledge sharing in the assembly domain. Specifically, it focuses on capturing and sharing assembly design knowledge and on integrating the assembly design domain with the Assembly Process Planning (APP) domain through ontological modeling. A multilayered, heavyweight ontology framework, called the Product-Assembly Planning Ontology (PAPO), is proposed to integrate product assembly and APP. The ontology is based on product assembly features and uses these design features to provide the high-level semantic knowledge necessary to integrate product assembly design with APP. The paper also describes a detailed methodology for ontology design. Additionally, a rule-based engine is developed to reason about the available assembly design and APP knowledge and to infer new knowledge from them. Case study examples are included to illustrate the approach.