An Ontology-Enabled Case-Based Reasoning Decision Support System for Manufacturing Process Selection

Abstract

In nowadays industry 4.0 and changeable manufacturing context, designers and manufacturing engineers struggle to determine appropriate quick, accurate (with flawless quality), and cost-effective processes to design highly customized products to meet customer requirements. To determine manufacturing processes, the matching between product features, material characteristics, and process capabilities needs to be optimized. Finding such an optimized matching is usually referred to as manufacturing process selection (MPS), which is not an easy task because of the infinite combinations of product features, numerous material characteristics, and various manufacturing processes. Although problems associated with MPS have received considerable attention, semantic web technologies are still underexplored and their potential is still uncovered. Almost no previous study has considered combining case-based reasoning (CBR) with ontologies, a famous and powerful semantic web enabler, to achieve MPS. In this study, we developed a decision support system (DSS) for MPS based on ontology-enabled CBR. By applying automatic reasoning and similarity retrieving on an industrial case study, we show that ontologies enable process selection by determining competitive matching between product features, material characteristics, and process capabilities and by endorsing effective case retrieval.