Sharing manufacturing knowledge

Manufacturing and design knowledge is typically distributed across a variety of functional domains such as quality analysis, cost estimation, and manufacturability evaluation. Knowledge Based Systems typically use modelling constructs to represent the entities within these domains, but this leads to difficulties when knowledge needs to be shared between domains. Independently developed constructs often describe The same entities may be described by different modelling constructs resulting in a requirement for complex mappings between common constructs. The use of constructs based on neutral standards eases these difficulties with the Process Specification Language (PSL) the most developed ontology for manufacturing processes. In this paper PSL is used as a neutral ontology for manufacturing knowledge in a design environment.