Tools and methodologies for knowledge representation: generation of an ABAS domain ontology

Abstract

Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) emerge as a solution to meet continuously changing market demands of manufacturing systems. Although RMS are already reconfigurable at the mechanical level, due to the modular design they lack autonomous reprogramming of the software components. The autonomous reconfiguration of the software associated and the "plug and play" capability of the hardware components provides a new breed of RMS named Rapidly Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RRMS).The development of ICT technologies has made it possible to introduce technologies for autonomous software configurations. Ontologies represent a solution for formal knowledge representation.Ontologies implement machine-interpretable information, which enables software agents to infer sufficient knowledge to automatically select, compose and orchestrate the mechatronic components of the machines and systems.The objective of this thesis is to create a domain ontology representing the Actor-Based Assembly Systems (ABAS) concept developed at the Tampere University of Technology. Reasoning techniques are moreover presented based on the developed ontology.In order to achieve these objectives, the foundations of ontologies as forrnal representation of knowledge are surveyed. The survey goes through the foundations of ontology languages making special consideration in the Web Ontology Language, Description Logic subset (OWL DL). Tools and methodologies for modelling the domain ontology are implemented and the ABAS Domain Ontology is generated.