Ontologies in System Engineering: a Field Report
This work addresses the problem of improving system engineering practices for industrial applications, but it is incremental as it assesses existing ontology-based approaches rather than introducing new methods.
The paper examines the application of ontologies in system engineering to enhance tasks like design, monitoring, and diagnosis, reporting methodologies and results from four case studies to evaluate their merits and limitations.
In recent years ontologies enjoyed a growing popularity outside specialized AI communities. System engineering is no exception to this trend, with ontologies being proposed as a basis for several tasks in complex industrial implements, including system design, monitoring and diagnosis. In this paper, we consider four different contributions to system engineering wherein ontologies are instrumental to provide enhancements over traditional ad-hoc techniques. For each application, we briefly report the methodologies, the tools and the results obtained with the goal to provide an assessment of merits and limits of ontologies in such domains.