On designing a unified ontology for holonic manufacturing networks

Small and medium enterprise (SME) manufacturers are generally better off being part of groups of integrated companies which collectively add value to an end-product. An SME is limited in two ways: by its resources and by its knowledge. In contrast, a well-created manufacturing network should have the necessary competencies in resources and knowledge it needs. While an individually owned ontology inherits the heterogeneous nature of the SMEs, the manufacturing network system integrator needs a universal knowledge base and ontology; an ontology that the SMEs would understand and 'willingly' contribute information to. This paper presents the manufacturing system ontology with a foundational framework from the Product Resource Order Staff Architecture (PROSA). With multi-agent system environment in mind, the ontology is designed for agent interpretability. The exchange and processing of production, production execution and process information need to be automated as far as possible. This paper intends to present a reusable and scalable ontology in Ontology Web Language (OWL). The paper highlights the concepts and slots that constitute the ontology and a knowledge base with a set of rules that allows selection of resources for the manufacturing of a product. The proposed ontology is finally appraised against a set of criteria and compared with a number of existing ontologies for manufacturing networks.