Towards a Road-Mapping Ontology for Open Innovation in Smart Manufacturing

In nascent areas, such as Smart Manufacturing, new collaborative research and development programs (R&D) are frequently formed with the goal to ignite the innovation lifecycle. Yet, clearly formulating common goals and enabling shared understanding of key concepts, which are critical to achieving these goals, often involve long, drawn-out processes. These processes typically involve road-mapping that meet the need for informal, albeit imprecise and ambiguous, communications. We are starting to develop a road-mapping meta-model and an associated ontology to provide more precise and less ambiguous communications in a recently started R&D program on Smart Manufacturing. To that effect, in this paper, we analyze use cases to provide input into the meta-model and ontology development.