Ontology Based Intelligent Assistance System to Support Manufacturing Activities in a Distributed Manufacturing Environment

The automotive industry is experiencing several limitations due to high mass customization on product side and the consequent evolution of newer ones as well as the expansion of existing production setups. There exist various complexities in planning and control of distributed production setups. This paper addresses issues related to planning using knowledge management approaches in the decentralized manufacturing domain with two distinct cases. The first case relates to the higher level planning methodology to automate experts’ knowledge in production ramp-up whereas the second case relates to optimization of production processes using knowledgebase as an intelligent assistance system for optimization.