An Ontology-based Metamodel for Capability Descriptions

This paper presents an approach to describe abilities of manufacturing resources by a formal description of capabilities using Semantic Web technologies. A hierarchical ontology architecture is proposed to represent, publish, and extend knowledge on capabilities for different application domains and use cases. Furthermore, the paper describes patterns of how the underlying formal logic can be used in taxonomy modeling and the inference of implicit capability facts. The usability and performance of the approach was validated by formalizing capability knowledge of related work and evaluated in benchmarking a prototypical implemented tool for managing and querying catalogs of resources and their capabilities. The proposed concept is intended to be used as a foundation for a future multi-layered feasibility checking, which evaluates the compatibility of resources and their offered skills with the requirements of manufacturing tasks at symbolic and subsymbolic levels. Extended evaluations might be based on parameters, analytics, simulation, and other means.