Ontology Development for a Manufacturing Data Base for Products with Graded Properties

Manufacturing technology opens new perspectives for tailored made parts. A new thermo-mechanically coupled forming process is used to affect the material properties at the microstructural level. With this process is possible to produce functional graded components. This means a steady progress of the microstructure's variation through at least one spatial dimension with the intention to establish macroscopic properties of the part. However, such manufacturing components need a sophisticated process design which takes into account the interaction between the manufacturing processes, the sequences of the manufacturing steps and the attributes of the part. Therefore we develop a methodology for the synthesis of the manufacturing process for these components. It starts with the description of the part and uses an Expert System to create the sequence of the manufacturing steps. The key factor of the Expert System is the synthesis of manufacturing functions. Hence, we are developing an ontology to support this. The focus of this paper is the ontology's design. We describe the modeling of the ontology starting with the knowledge extraction of the manufacturing process. Finally we apply the ontology on an example.