PRoduct ONTOlogy. Defining Product-Related Concepts for Production Planning Activities

DIEGO GIMENEZ; MARCELA VEGETTI; GABRIELA HENNING; HORACIO LEONE

Computer-Aided Chemical Engineering, 21B

Elsevier

Lugar: Amsterdan; Año: 2006; p. 2219 - 2224

Current Internet-based technologies enable the operation of Extended Supply Chains (ESCs) and introduce new requirements on enterprise systems. There is a real need to manage product-related information in such ESCs, where product models are the fundamental information source. Products models integrate and manage all the data that defines a product in the context of an industrial enterprise, providing the information that manufacture organizations need for production planning activities. In order to be efficient, planning activities require accurate and reliable information from such models. Traditionally, product information mostly resides in intra-organizational systems, especially ERP, Product Data Management (PDM), and, more recently, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems. Nevertheless, these systems lack of efficient support for inter-organizational business integration required by ESCs. One major obstacle is the low degree of automation in the exchange and integration of product-related data among business partners, mainly due to the use of different representations. In order to avoid this problem, Web-based PDM systems arise. Although these systems are technically and syntactically integrated, they do not allow a common understanding yet. Research activities in this area are oriented towards the use of ontologies as a foundation for the “Semantic Web”. An ontology is an explicit and formal specification of a shared conceptualization and provides a conceptual framework for communicating in a given application domain. Vegetti et.al. (2002) has presented a model for complex products and its prototype implementation, called COOBOM (Complex Object-Oriented Bill Of Materials). This approach adopts both the generative BOM philosophy where a specific BOM is derived from a common product structure and the product family concept. The use of this particular concept enables an enterprise to base its planning activities on aggregated product data. Particularly, COOBOM considers three levels of abstraction in relation to the product concept: product family, product variant and product BOM (or physical product) that allow handling information with different aggregation degrees. Though COOBOM considers only structural information at each level, it is possible to extend it to incorporate other types of useful information. In order to pursue this goal, this contribution presents an ontology called PRoduct ONTOlogy (PRONTO) that formalizes and extends the model underlying COOBOM with product-related concepts associated to planning activities. PRONTO defines such concepts at each of the abstraction levels mentioned above. They are classified in five categories in agreement with two criteria: i) the degree of information aggregation and ii) the ownership of the associated data. PRONTO provides the foundation for a distributed product data management (DPDM) system using semantic web technology. The architecture of this system is also presented in this paper. The DPDM system is implemented using Jena, a semantic web framework. With the purpose of testing the semantic expressiveness of the proposed ontology, a food industry related case-study is addressed.