Bridging the gap between product lifecycle management and sustainability in manufacturing through ontology building

Highlights

• Proposal of a unique product lifecycle vision, which combines three perspectives, namely innovation, production and materials perspectives.

• Proposal of a structured body-of-knowledge related to product metadata and manufacturing processes with emphasis on sustainability.

• Semantic ground from which future works towards interoperability between information systems can be built upon.

• Harmonization of terms found in product data modelling literature with those commonly found in sustainability and manufacturing references.

Abstract

Green manufacturing has been a major concern in recent years. As product lifecycle management strategies embrace sustainability within its spectrum of multi-disciplinary efforts, it has become crucial that manufacturing companies have the ability to exchange product and process related data with emphasis on sustainability not only amongst its internal information systems like CAD, CAPP and ERP, but also throughout their supply chain and other stakeholders. Industry demands solutions for interoperability between heterogeneous systems that can account for the necessary semantics in order to establish seamless, unambiguous information sharing of data from a product's cradle to its grave. One of the most promising approaches to overcome these issues is the use of ontologies that serve as interlingua, for translating between local data structures. The present research proposes an ontology that relates sustainability terms to product and process data entities through semantic ties.

Introduction

Manufacturing companies throughout the world have gradually turned their attention to sustainability matters, as a strategy for competitiveness. However, environmental regulations, such as RoHS, REACH and EuP ([1]) have enforced new specific requirements to be met. At the same time, customers are more aware of possible hazardous effects of manufacturing operations on the environment and consequently on their lives. Moreover, products that are environmentally benign have attracted more attention, for customers may prefer them amongst others. Therefore, markets, as well as regulations and self-consciousness, have driven enterprise-wide initiatives that favour environment-friendly activities. Yet, the challenge to harmonize current manufacturing practices with ongoing sustainability efforts remains. According to [2], [3], there is a strong sense of dissatisfaction among business executives and engineers, as they do not fully understand the sustainability problem while they try to apply different approaches on a trial-and-error basis.

On the other hand, companies have had to deal with an increasingly demanding exchange of information in order to cope with geographically dispersed research, development and manufacturing facilities. In addition, there has been demand for customized items, tailored to specific needs, which makes the amount of data to be handled increase exponentially. And more importantly, product lifecycle management strategies require that all phases a given product goes through, from cradle-to-grave, be integrated by means of seamless, reliable and relevant information exchange. However, islands of information still persist, for information systems that are used throughout the entire cycle have not been developed to allow semantic interpretation of data, which invariably leads to great losses due to data replication and ambiguity issues. The need for interoperability has been recognized as a major topic by several different institutions, like the US Department of Defense and similar European organizations ([4]). On top of that, environmental concerns have led companies to consider servicing and disposal of products as crucial activities within a product's lifecycle ([5]).

According to [13], one of the most promising approaches to handle interoperability issues among engineering applications, as well as other important information systems used in product lifecycle management, is the use of ontologies. An ontology consists of a vocabulary used in a given knowledge domain, enriched by some specification of the meaning or semantics of the terminology within the vocabulary. Therefore, ontologies can potentially be used to bridge the gap between heterogeneous information systems, including those related to sustainability in manufacturing and product/process information models. [13] suggest a so-called interlingua approach, which proposes the use of a shared ontology as a translating element to facilitate communication between heterogeneous information systems. Actually, the use of semantic tools to guarantee unambiguous exchange of information has been perceived not only as a trend, but also as the future format of standards, as opposed to purely syntactic forms such as the EXPRESS language or XML ([6]).

The present paper proposes a reference ontology that may ultimately be used to overcome interoperability issues between engineering and business applications and facilitate the use of sustainability data throughout a product's lifecycle. Such an ontology has its taxonomy derived from terms extracted from currently used and evolving standards, product and process information models, and a PLM domain specific controlled vocabulary. In Section 2, we briefly describe previous work found in the literature. In Section 3, we propose a model to harmonize the different interpretations of a product's lifecycle found in the literature. In Section 4, the sources of information to build the proposed ontology are described, as well as the tools and general approach used. In addition, relevant issues such as the criteria used to select entities and properties, and the difficulties faced are covered. In Section 5, we present extracts of the ontology in its current state, focusing the discussion on controversial terms and properties. In Section 6, an application example is given, in order to further clarify the potential use of the proposed ontology. Our final remarks and suggestions for future work are reported in Section 7.