Ontology for cloud manufacturing based Product Lifecycle Management

The manufacturing environment has become increasingly competitive in the past few years, and product development is getting even more complex. The agility of an information system is a way to manage this complexity, and cloud technologies enable the sharing of tools and information in a new way. In particular, in the field of Product Lifecycle Management, a review of the literature demonstrates that there are technical issues that limit the efficient collaboration between the various stakeholders along the product lifecycle. Cloud manufacturing is a new concept that enables the virtualization of manufacturing resources and capabilities and provides them as a service. Therefore it offers new prospects for usage and collaboration in the extended enterprise, and along the product lifecycle. For instance, it helps to manage variations in production demand, by providing a large set of potential manufacturing resources on demand. However, to share the resources within the cloud manufacturing environment, a unification model of the domain information is required, to which any provider and/or user of cloud manufacturing must conform in order to dialog with the other CM stakeholders. This study provides an ontological model of the cloud manufacturing domain in order to support information exchange between the cloud manufacturing resources. The concepts of the proposed ontology are based on a literature review of models of cloud and models of manufacturing. The detailed ontology is then validated using the OntoClean methodology and within its implementation in an industrial scenario.