Towards Ontology-Based Modeling of Technical Documentation and Operation Data of the Engineering Asset

Management of engineering assets within an organization is a crucial interdisciplinary approach that aims to optimize their performance and guarantee their overall effectiveness through efficient decision making. This task is always largely supported by official technical documentation created by the asset manufacturer which describes in detail the asset's functionality, architecture as well all necessary information such as testing, operation and maintenance specifications. This valuable information has to be accessible and comprehensive since it essentially dictates the target asset configuration, operation and maintenance modes and strategies in order to guarantee the asset's performance and availability. However, current technical documentations mainly consist of textual and graphical documents that often are poorly written and constructed, misleading, unavailable, outdated and are read by users with as little effort as possible. This results in a poor connection of the operating asset with its original documentation that prevents the asset from reaching its full potential. In this work, we will propose the new concept of using ontologies as a form of documentation that accompanies the official technical documentation and is created by the manufacturer and provided to the customer. We will also propose the use of a generic asset management ontology model that asset users can be based on to create their own domain asset ontology. Finally, we will demonstrate with examples how the use of the ontology and its reasoning mechanism is ideal to identify potential problems in the operation, configuration and maintenance of the asset, as well as potentially discover areas for improvement. We expect that eventually this concept will gather all the knowledge necessary to assist in the decision making process in order to improve the asset's availability, longevity and quality of operations.

Ensuring Asset Optimization through Ontology-based Modelling of Technical Documentation

Andreas Koukias

The physical or engineering assets within modern industries have consistently been considered as the core elements of significant value that constitute the backbone for success and overall growth. Ensuring the optimal performance of an asset is a crucial and challenging task, since any breakdown or downtime may have a large impact on product quality, cost of production, operation effectiveness, or even cause health, safety and environmental issues. The performance of any asset within an industrial environment is greatly dependent on the overall usage and maintenance instructions provided by the asset manufacturer to the user. These instructions have always been in the form of a technical documents compilation that accompanies the physical asset. These documents describe the product in a complete manner and often constitute the first line of support when asset operators or maintenance engineers need help with a problem or when they seek to advance their use of an asset. The documentation inherently dictates how the asset should be overall managed in order to achieve the optimal performance. The motivation for this work lies in the fact that traditional technical documentations mainly consist of textual and graphical documents with information that is not being properly put to effective use. Although there has been great progress in newer electronic versions, essentially it is still an arduous and time-consuming process for the users to identify specific answers to their problems or questions. It often requires considerable effort to locate much needed information, especially in case of unexpected emergencies. The documentation is often inaccessible, outdated, has a poor structure and language, and may assume knowledge that the readers don't essentially possess. Therefore, the information included in the documentation is not always being properly and fully consumed by the asset users. Overall, there is a gap between the original documentation instructions and the actual usage that may prevent the assetsâ overall effectiveness from reaching its full potential and may have great repercussions such as damage to the assets, the environment, or even injury to the personnel[6]. This dissertation proposes an ontology-based approach to represent the technical documentation content concerning the assetâs overall usage and maintenance. Ontologies possess high expressive power and degree of formality and most importantly they can describe the content in a machine understandable manner. The approach proposes using ontologies towards efficiently processing and consuming the documentation content in order to confirm that the asset is operated and maintained according to the manufacturerâs instructions. The Technical Documentation Ontology model is developed to represent all the important information contained in the documentation concerning how the asset should be managed. The approach subsequently proposes the implementation of a rule-based mechanism to check the real asset information that is collected during the actual asset usage against the documentation instructions. By comparing the real asset data and the respective instructions, it is possible to identify abnormal behaviors or deviations and recommend appropriate usage and maintenance actions towards ensuring or even optimizing the asset performance. Finally, the approach is validated and evaluated within a case study implemented on a packaging machine from a major Swiss company.

EPFL2014

Ensuring Asset Optimization through Ontology-based Modelling of Technical Documentation

Andreas Koukias

EPFL2014