(486w) Ontological Chemical Flexible Infrastructure Light and Heavy Approach towards Enterprise System Integration

The possibility of establishing cross hierarchy models of the activities involved in manufacturing control and thus constituting a general model of functions within an enterprise (data infrastructure) is a key for success in improving the production process. To achieve this interoperability an ontological chemical process flexible infrastructure is developed and used.

The ontology reveals general structures and patterns of relationships in the world. We can say that an ontology is a bridge between real world and the universe of information, contributing to a dynamic world modeling fundamentals, principles, constructions, representations, and plans for the construction of a new class of smart technologies and Knowledge Systems: Technology Semantics Ontology. Moreover, since computing is worried with computable structures and processes, in addition to the ontological infrastructure benefits, key branches are open like: Knowledge engineering, conceptual modeling in information systems and databases, type systems and domain modeling in programming languages design.

Intelligent Databases (IDB) originate from the integration of database technology with artificial intelligence technology. Typically in web applications each intelligent database agent can be defined as a Knowledge system (KS) with a global ontology, which integrates a number of source data distributed in the Web by traditional extensional mappings, and must be robust enough in order to take into account the incomplete and locally inconsistent information of its own sources. Having in mind all the preceding, this philosophy is applied within the ontological infrastructure, in order to exploit all the benefits and usability of this tool.

In this work, different perspectives are taken into account and the mappings between them for developing Flexpron (Flexible Process Ontology). Flexpron contemplates the enterprise control system integration, where processes are categorized, the relationships between them are examined and imposed, and properties that aim to specify the aforementioned relationships are introduced. Concepts (physical, procedures, functions and processes) and instances have been developed in accordance with ISA-88 standard. In the same way concepts of functions (Order processing, production scheduling, production control, quality assurance, etc) have been developed according to ISA95. Besides, these files are based in other standards. On the one hand this ontology is structured by XML (Extensible Markup Language) elements and files based in the ISA/WBF standards. Additionally it uses W3C MATHML mathematical structure standards.

The study made in chemical processes addresses the scheduling and lot sizing tasks developed within this informatics infrastructure Flexpron, which supports different activities by streamlining information gathering, data integration, model development and decision making. Site, master and control recipes, distributed inside the Ontology representing a chemical flexible process have been developed. These recipes contain a variety of information about available raw materials, processing requirements, the manufacturing of a single batch of a specific product, etc. Once this information has been created the schedule and lot sizing files are made available by the optimization algorithm which makes use of external elements (solvers). An intelligent data base is created mapping the data sources of each element required, resulting in a dataset where data are called depending of the nature of the product schedule and the lot sizing intention.

Overall, flexpron generate a syntactically and semantically richer intelligent database scheme than common database approaches, allowing the management and improvement of plant-wide system in an enterprise. In this particular application, schedule and lot sizing tasks, it showed a good performance in order to backing the decision support system task. Flexpron aims at enhancing information sharing and exchange while, simultaneously, may provide a domain theory, covering the informatics needs in chemical process industries.

The ontological infrastructure has been built using OWL-Protègè software. The use of this software makes possible the performance of this ontology in a light ontological approach by the use of web-protègè, potentially for human-readable performance (Informal specification). Furthermore, it has been used in a heavy ontological approach, which allows the share of information and knowledge besides the optimization in the description and execution of chemical processes, human-readable (expertise) and computer-readable performance (formal specification).

References

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