Towards the digital factory: Data re-use and fusion

The Digital Factory or digital manufacturing stands for the digitization of the design-to-manufacture processes. It enables to integrate design (CAD) tools, product lifecycle management (PLM) tools, simulation software, analytical applications, and control technologies. With these technologies a virtual factory may be created in which a product can be built and validated prior to commissioning any of the equipment used to build it or producing physical prototypes. The data is the essential basis for the digital factory. Even if planning from scratch there exist machine readable data from components, former planning, product data sheets etc., that may be reused thus reducing the amount of work. Data for heterogeneous automation systems occurs in many different ways and formats. This could be some paper text, in digital form or even XML-based description languages. Although data for automation systems becomes more and more available in digital form, it may not be reused throughout the complete life cycle of such systems because of various different machine readable formats and no formalized semantics of the data. This results in misinterpretations, inconsistencies, redundancies and a lot of inefficient work and evitable cost. This paper presents a solution, how information may be read, interpreted and related to other information by using semantic techniques. The proposed evolutionary solution respects well established heterogeneous semantic concepts and allows a stepwise enrichment of semantic content.