Production ontology - development of a digital documentation for traceable and certifiable processes

Abstract

The documentation of component manufacture has become an essential part of today’s production processes, not only for the obligation to provide proof to customers, but also for the analysis and optimisation of production or component design (design for manufacture). In order to link the different disciplines of component development, standardisation is necessary, both in the description of the processes as well as in the underlying information and data structure. Digital manufacturing instructions and process documentation based on a standardised process description extended with the automatic recording of process data offers great potential for robust and efficient processes. A semantic data model also provides data consistency and increased possibilities for process analysis and optimisation. In this contribution, a method based on [1] for the standardised description of manufacturing processes for composite materials is elaborated and prepared for the use in the digital documentation of manufacturing processes. A corresponding digital life data sheet (LDS), which is a combination of manufacturing instructions and manufacturing documentation, is implemented using the Atlassian Confluence software and applied to the manufacturing of a composite multispar moveable of a long-range reference aircraft configuration. An evaluation of the developed digital LDS is performed and potential improvements are identified. In addition, the semantic data model is described on which the LDS is based. Furthermore, the transfer of the developed workflow to production ontologies is described to give an outlook on current work to optimise the process description and to close missing links of dependent formalised process description (FPD) elements. Finally, the main results are summarised and discussed.