Development of a Methodology for the Digital Representation of Manufacturing Technology Capabilities

Abstract

The demand for efficient and digital systems for supporting the decision making during the design of a product is a key issue in manufacturing companies. Decisions made during the development and design of a product have a strong impact on the costs and delivery times of a product. Hence, a digital system which supports the engineer during and after the development process with information about the manufacturability of the product can reduce the production costs and times. In order to be able to evaluate the manufacturing capabilities at manufacturing process and machine level, there is a need to represent them in a digital way. Digital knowledge bases like taxonomies and ontologies provide the possibility for a representation of manufacturing resources. The state of the art shows different approaches for the use of ontologies in the domain of subtractive manufacturing processes as well as additive manufacturing (AM) processes. The goal of this work is the semantical representation of manufacturing technology capabilities with focus on AMmachines and processes. In this paper we introduce taxonomies of Manufacturing Features and Manufacturing Restrictions which were developed in accordance with current standards. To enrich the taxonomies with information, it was enhanced by relations between different manufacturing related entities in a knowledge graph. If manufacturing processes and machines can be digitally mapped, described and linked to the geometric information of a product together with information on the current performance of the company/network, bottlenecks and delivery delays during the manufacturing of parts can be avoided.