Constructing knowledge models and an ontology for adjusting specifications of industrial machinery

Abstract

This collaborative research with a manufacturing company focuses on the adjustment process of design specifications of industrial machinery. The adjustment process consists of two steps; (1) to extract such specifications that need to be adjusted from the required specifications given by a customer and (2) to propose changes of those specifications for negotiation with the customer. In order to help engineers perform such processes efficiently, this research aims at knowledge modeling of past cases of adjusted specifications and ontology building for defining concepts in the knowledge models. The similarity calculation using the semantic structure of the ontology can improve the recall ratio of the extraction of the specifications to be adjusted. The semantic relations in the knowledge models could also contribute to higher accuracy ratio. Furthermore, the pattern knowledge of the past changes will realize semi-automatic generation of proposals of adjusted changes.