The development of an ontology for describing the capabilities of manufacturing resources

Today’s highly volatile production environments call for adaptive and rapidly responding production systems that can adjust to the required changes in processing functions, production capacity and dispatching of orders. There is a desire to support such system adaptation and reconfiguration with computer-aided decision support systems. In order to bring automation to reconfiguration decision making in a multi-vendor resource environment, a common formal resource model, representing the functionalities and constraints of the resources, is required. This paper presents the systematic development process of an OWL-based manufacturing resource capability ontology (MaRCO), which has been developed to describe the capabilities of manufacturing resources. As opposed to other existing resource description models, MaRCO supports the representation and automatic inference of combined capabilities from the representation of the simple capabilities of co-operating resources. Resource vendors may utilize MaRCO to describe the functionality of their offerings in a comparable manner, while the system integrators and end users may use these descriptions for the fast identification of candidate resources and resource combinations for a specific production need. This article presents the step-by-step development process of the ontology by following the five phases of the ontology engineering methodology: feasibility study, kickoff, refinement, evaluation, and usage and evolution. Furthermore, it provides details of the model’s content and structure.