An Ontology-Based Framework for Collaborative Maintenance Planning

Three essential elements for formulating the maintenance planning are the choice of maintenance policy, defining maintenance procedure and allocation of maintenance resources. The granularity of computer-aided maintenance planning mainly depends on the representation granularity of maintenance procedure. After analyzing the typical mode to make computer-aided maintenance planning, we put forward one ontology-based framework for collaborative maintenance planning, whose concepts are divided into maintenance knowledge category and maintenance business category. Then the concepts and the relationships among them are explored through the ontology models in concept layer and one example in instance layer. Finally some models are illustrated using ontology language. The framework is flexible and practical to the maintenance of various kinds of products especially to complex products. The detailed work of maintenance planning can be generated automatically according to the correspondence of the concepts between the knowledge category and the business category.