Development of an Application Ontology for Knowledge Management to Support Aircraft Assembly System Design

During the early phase of an aircraft program, industrial architects need to evaluate different industrial scenarios and perform trade-offs to optimize the future industrial architecture according to different key performance indicators. Expert knowledge accumulated during previous programs provides foundation for the new one. It is a challenging task to capture and reuse expert knowledge in a consistent way. This paper presents a case study about the development of a formal application ontology for aircraft assembly processes. It aims to facilitate expert knowledge capturing from existing programs and reusing it to support new aircraft assembly system design. This application ontology inherits the structure and classes from the IOF-Core ontology as the basis, which adopts BFO as the top-level ontology. Historical assembly process specifications and domain experts' feedbacks are used as knowledge sources of the ontology. Relevant elements of the assembly process including all the operations, materials and manufacturing resources are extracted and integrated into the ontology as individuals. Based on the analysis of these individuals, common knowledge which can be reused in similar processes can be generalized as interrelated classes of the ontology. The detailed development approach of the application ontology is introduced using an industrial pilot. The developed ontology is integrated as the core functional block of a trade space framework. It can help track stakeholders' requirements and support co-simulations of the new assembly process.