Application of semantic technologies in engineering processes for manufacturing systems

A common trend for manufacturing systems is an increasing integration of engineering activities including its planning information. Vice versa this is due to a loss of the historical separation between engineering disciplines as well as their workflows and documents. A characteristic aspect of information of manufacturing systems and its components is a distributed storage of information over engineering departments or companies. To realise an automatic reuse of engineering information, a harmonisation of the information structures, notation as well as the information itself among existing models in an engineering scenario must be given. The goal of this paper is to point out characteristic aspects and requirements on information integration and the potentials of semantic approaches. Furthermore, the approach is illustrated by a typical use case for manufacturing systems.