An ISA-95 based Ontology for Manufacturing Systems Knowledge Description Extended with Semantic Rules

There is a trend about the adoption of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning formalisms, such as ontologies, for industrial automation. For example, semantic models are used as knowledge bases that encapsulate different type of information of manufacturing systems, e.g., statuses and capabilities of their cyber and physical resources. Moreover, these models can be updated and accessed during runtime. In this context, models are becoming a critical part of the system infrastructure for both controlling and monitoring activities. However, models tend to be designed for specific purposes and not standardized. This is an issue because the employed formalisms, such as ontologies, emerged in order to bring an engineering tool for commonly classifying, defining, and sharing information. This article proposes the development of modular ontologies based on different parts of the ISA-95 standard for describing the product, process, and resource information of manufacturing systems. In addition, this research work demonstrates a set of semantic rules that may be used for inferring implicit knowledge of the ontology that permits the automatic checking of the required machines to manufacture different product variants.