Knowledge Graph-based Support for Automated Manufacturability Analysis

The Industry 4.0 (I40) vision demands flexibility in product manufacturing in order to meet the requirements of customers. Typically, these requirements change over time due to the demand for a completely new product or for a variant of some existing product. Production lines need to adapt accordingly in order to meet the new requirements. This is usually a very time-consuming process and involves a great deal of human effort. In this paper, we present a knowledge graph based approach for semantically describing product features and line capabilities. The benefit of our approach is twofold. On one hand, the customers’ requirements can formally be realized in product features. On the other hand, finding the candidate lines (to accomplish the manufacturing demands) is then to query for a match between the product features and the line capabilities. Thus, the overall process of fulfilling customers’ demands is highly improved.