Research of FMEA Knowledge Sharing Method Based on Ontology and the Application in Manufacturing Process

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is an important method to ensure the effectiveness of manufacturing process, which can prevent the happening of various potential failure. If the knowledge of FMEA can be accumulated and utilized reasonably, the quality management in manufacturing process will get decision support timely, and the efficiency of product quality problem analysis also can be improved. But, it is impossible to integrate the dispersive FMEA knowledge in the manufacturing process because there is a lack of unified management criterion of FMEA knowledge. In order to satisfy the requirement to share, reuse, and maintain FMEA knowledge, the representation method of FMEA knowledge based on ontology is put forward in this study. The structure of FMEA knowledge ontology can be described via visual modeling tool-Unified Modeling Language. In this study, the FMEA repository has been built and the acquisition, storage and searching of FMEA knowledge has been researched to satisfy the need of sharing and reusing of the FMEA knowledge in the manufacturing process.