Ontology in Holonic Cooperative Manufacturing: A Solution to Share and Exchange the Knowledge
This addresses the need for efficient knowledge sharing in industrial cooperative manufacturing, but it is incremental as it applies existing ontology concepts to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of managing and exchanging knowledge in cooperative manufacturing by proposing a holonic control solution using ontology to represent manufacturing knowledge, implemented in a multi-agent system for a cooperative assembly scenario with two workers and one collaborative robot.
Cooperative manufacturing is a new trend in industry, which depends on the existence of a collaborative robot. A collaborative robot is usually a light-weight robot which is capable of operating safely with a human co-worker in a shared work environment. During this cooperation, a vast amount of information is exchanged between the collaborative robot and the worker. This information constructs the cooperative manufacturing knowledge, which describes the production components and environment. In this research, we propose a holonic control solution, which uses the ontology concept to represent the cooperative manufacturing knowledge. The holonic control solution is implemented as an autonomous multi-agent system that exchanges the manufacturing knowledge based on an ontology model. Ultimately, the research illustrates and implements the proposed solution over a cooperative assembly scenario, which involves two workers and one collaborative robot, whom cooperate together to assemble a customized product.