Using ontology-based reference models in digital production engineering integration

in the digital planning process of a manufacturing plant several partners like OEM, prime contractor and further service providers are participated usually. Since the partners have partially overlapping views (electricity, mechanical structure, plant controlling) on the same plant to be produced, they have to exchange data during their collaboration. However the syntactical, structural and even semantical differences of output and expected data of partners makes a data integration necessary. Whilst dealing with syntactical and structural differences is rather easy, overcoming semantical differences has several obstacles. in this paper we introduce our ontology based reference model approach to solve this problem.