Ontology-Based Knowledge Management in Automotive Engineering Scenarios.

Nowadays the increasing complexity of cars has become a major challenge for car manufacturers, especially due to the growing rate of electronic components and software. This trend impacts all phases of the car's lifecycle, e.g. the process of testing cars and components. We describe a project from the automotive industry where a semantics-based approach is employed for improving the process of testing different configurations of cars. Here, ontologies serve two main purposes: (i) representing and sharing knowledge to optimize business processes for testing of cars and (ii) integrating live data into this optimization process. The ontology has been created and is now maintained with OntoStudio®. The ontology has been integrated into the internal order system of the car manufacturer to reduce the communication effort between the engineers for configuring test cars and to avoid misconfigurations of test cars. Keywords: applications; automotive; engineering; information integration; rules; Semantic Web [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]