PRONTO: An ontology for comprehensive and consistent representation of product information

Abstract

Nowadays, it is quite common for collaborating organizations (or even different areas within a company) to develop and maintain their own product model. This situation leads to information duplication and its associated problems. Besides, traditional product models do not properly handle the high number of variants managed in today competitive markets. In addition, there is a need for an integrated product model to be shared by all the organizations participating in global supply chains (SCs) or all the areas within a company. One way to reach an intelligent integration among product models is by means of an ontology. PRoduct ONTOlogy (PRONTO) is an ontology for the product modeling domain, able to efficiently handle product variants. It defines and integrates two hierarchies to represent product information: the abstraction hierarchy (AH) and the structural one (SH). This contribution presents a ConceptBase formal specification of PRONTO that focuses on the structural hierarchy of products. This hierarchy is a tool to handle product information associated with the multiple available recipes or processes to manufacture a particular product or a set of similar products. The formal specification presented in the paper also includes mechanisms to infer structural information from the explicit knowledge represented at each of the AH levels: Family, VariantSet and Product. This proposal efficiently handles a great number of variants and allows representing product information with distinct granularity degrees, which is a requirement for planning activities taking place at different time horizons. PRONTO easily manages crucial features that should be taken into account in a product representation, such as the efficient handling of product families and variants concepts, composition and decomposition structures and the possibility of specifying constraints. To demonstrate the semantic expressiveness of the proposed ontology a food industry related case-study is addressed and discussed in detail.