ExtruOnt: An ontology for describing a type of manufacturing machine for Industry 4.0 systems
This work addresses the need for semantically rich descriptions in Industry 4.0 systems, but it is incremental as it focuses on a specific machine type and could serve as a model for broader applications.
The authors tackled the lack of machine-interpretable descriptions for manufacturing machines in Industry 4.0 by developing ExtruOnt, an ontology specifically for extruders, which includes modules for components, spatial connections, features, 3D representations, and sensors.
Semantically rich descriptions of manufacturing machines, offered in a machine-interpretable code, can provide interesting benefits in Industry 4.0 scenarios. However, the lack of that type of descriptions is evident. In this paper we present the development effort made to build an ontology, called ExtruOnt, for describing a type of manufacturing machine, more precisely, a type that performs an extrusion process (extruder). Although the scope of the ontology is restricted to a concrete domain, it could be used as a model for the development of other ontologies for describing manufacturing machines in Industry 4.0 scenarios. The terms of the ExtruOnt ontology provide different types of information related with an extruder, which are reflected in distinct modules that constitute the ontology. Thus, it contains classes and properties for expressing descriptions about components of an extruder, spatial connections, features, and 3D representations of those components, and finally the sensors used to capture indicators about the performance of this type of machine. The ontology development process has been carried out in close collaboration with domain experts.