Developing of an ontology-based decision support system for securing experiential knowledge in toolmaking

The toolmaking industry is characterized by the industrial manufacturing of unique workpieces and one-off production. This challenge requires the use of a wide variety of manufacturing technologies, which leads to a high level of planning effort and a cross-technology understanding of the manufacturing process. The decision of manufacturing technology application is generally based on the many years of experiential knowledge of the individual employees. As a result of demographic change, it is expected that there will be a reduction in the number of experienced employees in the European toolmaking industry. In addition, the recruitment of qualified employees is challenging and uncertain, making it difficult to ensure the transfer of knowledge. Therefore, the necessary process knowledge is at risk to be no longer available. As a result, competitiveness and the realization of future improvement projects in mechanical manufacturing can be impaired. The challenge is to secure experiential knowledge in a machine-readable form that preserves the knowledge that can be used for decision-making processes. This requires the classification of workpieces and manufacturing characteristics to access existing machining processes and transfer insights to other processes. An ontology is considered as an effective approach to organize, share and reuse knowledge. Ontologies are capable of classifying domain knowledge and visualizing it in machine-readable form. This paper presents an approach to developing an ontology-based decision support system for toolmaking and one-off production that supports the selection of manufacturing technologies and preserves accumulated experiential knowledge. This paper is presenting the development of an ontology of mechanical manufacturing with an agile methodology for the development of domain-specific ontologies. Furthermore, the ontology is integrated into an application software. The structure of the ontology can be used to secure the growing experiential knowledge of toolmaking. The validation is conducted using a case study from the mechanical manufacturing of toolmaking.