Bridging the gap between product lifecycle management and sustainability in manufacturing through ontology building

• Proposal of a unique product lifecycle vision, which combines three perspectives, namely innovation, production and materials perspectives.
• Proposal of a structured body-of-knowledge related to product metadata and manufacturing processes with emphasis on sustainability.
• Semantic ground from which future works towards interoperability between information systems can be built upon.
• Harmonization of terms found in product data modelling literature with those commonly found in sustainability and manufacturing references.

Green manufacturing has been a major concern in recent years. As product lifecycle management strategies embrace sustainability within its spectrum of multi-disciplinary efforts, it has become crucial that manufacturing companies have the ability to exchange product and process related data with emphasis on sustainability not only amongst its internal information systems like CAD, CAPP and ERP, but also throughout their supply chain and other stakeholders. Industry demands solutions for interoperability between heterogeneous systems that can account for the necessary semantics in order to establish seamless, unambiguous information sharing of data from a product's cradle to its grave. One of the most promising approaches to overcome these issues is the use of ontologies that serve as interlingua, for translating between local data structures. The present research proposes an ontology that relates sustainability terms to product and process data entities through semantic ties.