Ontological Approach to Support the Horizontal and Vertical Information Integration in Smart Manufacturing Systems: An Experimental Case in a Long-Life Packaging Factory

Digital manufacturing has been challenged by the manufacturing industry to rationalize different ways to connect and exchange information and knowledge across different phases of manufacturing systems. One of the Industry 4.0 pillars is the horizontal and vertical integration with intelligent and self-adaptive systems. For this to be possible, the manufacturing industry applies an extensive range of software tools, such as GRAI, CIMOSA, MO2GO, ARIS, SCADA, MES, ERP, CAD, and CAM. Individually, each one performs its function to support the manufacturing process. However, when these multiple tools operate together using technical standards, some misinterpretation and mistake gaps are identified due to a lack of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and users’ interpretation. This is recognized as a semantic interoperability problem. Semantic technologies, such as ontologies, have been proven to be a promising way to overcome semantic interoperability obstacles. Based on this context, this study is proposing a conceptual framework based on semantic technologies to create a solution to the horizontal and vertical integration and semantic interoperability obstacle. MANUMATE is the framework proposed, and it consists of three artifacts, 1) reference ontologies, 2) requirements, and 3) application ontology, and two processes, 1) ontology specialization and 2) information application. The MANUMATE framework is applied to two experimental case studies to validate the conceptual solution in two different applications, in the context of a long-life package for the beverages industry. These case studies help elucidate how the application of the framework could improve the information and knowledge exchange by providing a standard way to represent information among different stakeholders in the productive process. A discussion about the results is presented, revealing the benefits and limitations of the solution.