Ontology-based linking of product development and production planning

Currently, industrial enterprises face a drop in demand for products and a lack in availability of investment funds. A promising reaction to this situation is to stimulate new demands by introducing new products thatare produced by means of existing equipment. In contrast to the resulting requirements, product realizationin companies can often be characterized by the involvement of separated functional departments usingspecific software systems with a low degree of integration. A novel approach to integrate functions and information along the life of production systems is Production-in-the-Loop that can be extended towardsproduct development to support not only production engineers by up-to-date product data, but developers by feedback from production engineering and by information about present production resources.