Edwards-Venn Diagrams for knowledge representation and reasoning in industrial systems

Edwards-Venn Diagrams (EVD) were introduced to facilitate knowledge representation and reasoning in connectionistic approach for modeling industrial systems. Semantic descriptions are seen helpful in solving the challenges of mass customization due to capability to capture knowledge interpretable both for humans and machines. However modern knowledge technologies could not provide required flexibility in expressing the semantics of dynamical nature of events and processes which are essential for industrial systems. This motivates further research for flexible yet formal tools for knowledge representation and reasoning. In order to provide flexible semantic descriptions to dynamic qualities of industrial systems, a connectionistic knowledge model — connectionistic concept grid (CCG) — was introduced, which was inspired by natural knowledge structure derived from connectionism approach to natural cognition. EVD were found useful to represent relations among different sets of concepts in CCG and to provide structural reasoning in the models.