Knowledge Change Management and Analysis during the Engineering of Cyber Physical Production Systems: A Use Case of Hydro Power Plants

Abstract

The process of designing Cyber Physical Production Systems (CPPS), e.g., modern power plants or steel mills, typically takes place in a multi-disciplinary engineering environment, in which experts from various engineering domains and organizations work together towards creating complex engineering artifacts. The process of designing such complex engineering artifacts requires iterations and redesign phases, which lead to continuous changes of the data and knowledge. To manage changes in such environment, we have previously proposed a generic reference process for conducting Knowledge Change Management and Analysis (KCMA). This paper implements this process for the case study of a modern Hydro Power Plant by adapting the proposed generic reference process into a scientific prototype developed using Semantic Web Technologies. Finally, we conduct an evaluation to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed reference process and the developed prototype. Thus, the contribution of this paper is two-folds: (1) A tool-supported prototype for KCMA of a hydro power plant, and (2) A feasibility evaluation of this prototype that reports feedback and lessons learned for achieving KCMA in real-world case studies.