Translation Ontology of optimal Decision Making along a Distributed Production Chain by Example

Traditionally, product design is done from within a company. From a purely economic point of view, it will focus on optimising product performance while minimising costs and waste. The optimisation uses key performance indicators, which often result from modelling the production processes and the product’s properties. Increasingly, though, product design and product manufacturing involve groups of companies, each of which has its own objectives and strategies. The central idea is to couple the single company-based silo optimisation to a collaborative optimisation and decision-making to unlock hereto hidden product innovation potentials on a digital platform. This platform supports the modelling process from describing the distributed manufacturing and the involved materials to product design, which we call Translation. In this contribution, we discuss a joint translation ontology, capturing the translation process and the recursive business-to-business process implemented in an H2020-funded innovation platform VIPCOAT.