Ontology network to support the integration of planning and scheduling activities in batch process industries

Abstract

In the last decades, the integration of information systems supporting planning, scheduling, and control has been a serious concern of the industrial community. Several standards have been developed to tackle this issue by addressing the exchange of data between the scheduling function and its immediate lower and upper levels in the planning pyramid. However, a more comprehensive approach is required to solve these integration problems, since this matter entails much more than data exchange. Along these lines, this article presents a network of ontologies that provides the foundations to reach an effective semantic interoperability among the various applications linked to scheduling activities. The proposed approach reuses and formalizes non-ontological resources, like the ISA-88 and ISA-95 standards, as well as the Resource Task Network (RTN) model. In addition, the application of the ontology network to a case study is also discussed in this article.