Title: Efficient management of product lifecycle information through a semantic platform

Authors: Giulia Bruno; Roman Korf; Joachim Lentes; Nikolas Zimmermann

Addresses: Department of Management and Production Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy ' USU Software AG, Karlstrasse 52, 76137 Karlsruhe, Germany ' Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO, Nobelstrasse 12, Stuttgart, Germany ' University of Stuttgart IAT, Nobelstrasse 12, Stuttgart, Germany

Abstract: Products generate a large amount of information during their lifecycle. Small and medium enterprises often lack an efficient management of such an amount of information. Several tools of product lifecycle management have been developed in the last years to address this issue, but they are rarely exploited by companies, especially SMEs. The aim of our work is to present a semantic platform to integrate data along the whole product lifecycle to allow semantic search and knowledge reuse. The integration of data is realised with a reference PLM ontology, containing the main concepts and relations to describe a PLM. This ontology has a modular structure, so that it can be easily extended to describe concrete product lifecycles. An example of a real application of the semantic platform in an industrial case is reported.

Keywords: PLM; product lifecycle management; manufacturing industry; knowledge management; information retrieval; semantic models; ontology; semantic search; UML; web ontology language; OWL; RDF; product information; small and medium-sized enterprises; SMEs; data integration; knowledge reuse.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPLM.2016.078864

International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management, 2016 Vol.9 No.1, pp.45 - 64

Received: 14 Dec 2015
Accepted: 22 Jun 2016
Published online: 03 Sep 2016 *

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