Information Management for Cutting Tools Information Models and Ontologies

Abstract: There is an increasing demand for the exchange of important product and manufacturing information in a computer interpretable way. Large manufacturing companies are dependent on having access to the necessary information electronically. If they do not get information about their manufacturing resources from their vendors, they will buy their resources elsewhere, or they will have to create the information themselves.In the end, the cost of the manufactured products will increase to accommodate the cost increase from having to create, integrate, and maintain this information.In order to solve this problem, the use of international standards for product data is required. One area where such a standard is required is the area of cutting tools.This thesis describes the requirements for an international standard for the representation and exchange of cutting tool information and the resulting information model together with necessary reference data.The representation of cutting tool information using an international standard requires a generally applicable information model which is used together with a reference data library. The reference data provides the explicit, unambiguous concepts necessary for successful information exchange.ISO 13399, the international standard that is the result of this research project, uses P-Lib (ISO 13584) to define its reference data. To successfully use P-Lib in this way, requires some basic assumptions to be made, since P-Lib is originally developed for component catalogs.As a result of the chosen representation technique, the standard is capable of accommodating current and future developments of cutting tools, e.g. multi function tools.