ontologies

Industrial devices have virtual and physical components that interact with each other in a plethora of ways. We report on a system that enables operators to pose queries about physical, regulatory and functional relationships between components and visualizes responses as a holographic overlay, thereby enabling in-situ querying and rendering of information for “on-the-spot” decisions. Importantly, our approach is not only applicable to digitally integrated components but applies equally well to “simple” objects such as surfaces and workpieces, and the materials they are made of.

The requirements of industrial production have drastically changed in the past. Mass production has been the predominant approach for decades, but there is a growing demand for individualized goods. In particular, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) deal with small lot sizes and even single-item production. These companies have very demanding requirements for robot deployment. Programming robots must be time efficient and not require specific expertise in robotics, so that shop floor workers can use them. In this article, we introduce a knowledge-based approach to address these issues.

Today’s economic situation can be characterized by increasingly changing demands from the markets to the companies leading to shorter product life-cycles in conjunction with cost-reductions. One of the strategical reactions of the companies is to enforce mutual collaboration. Hence collaborative business processes are the basis to establish such a collaboration on the process layer. The integraton of theses processes nearly in real-time is one today’s peculiar challenges. In the following a concept is described, that enables the dynamic interconnection of collaborative business-processes based upon a knowledge-based EAI.