• Process Planning
• Ontology
• Merging

Nowadays Process Planning plays a central role to achieve efficiency and flexibility within a manufacturing system. It represents, indeed, the intersection point of different areas within the company: product design, resource planning, part assembly and production control. Thus, considerable research and development efforts have been devoted to this issue in the last decades.

The present thesis, developed at the Institute of Production Engineering and Machine Tools (IFW) of Hanover, aims to develop an approach for a methodical and complete determination of the technological resources to be used to manufacture a part.
The project is part of a wider research aimed at defining a procedure of semi-automated generation and evaluation of alternative process sequences within the process planning activity.
Ontologies have been used to store the knowledge within our approach. Thanks to the advantages deriving from their use, other aims for the present work are to enable the system to quickly adapt to the current production situation and easily extend.
The IFW model factory with its production infrastructure has served as an example. Finally the validity of the ontology-based system developed has been tested by means of an example.