Building a Factory Knowledge Base

In past decades, production has been characterized by the mass customization trend. This concept reaches its extreme with the one-of-a-kind production (OKP): every product is different for each customer. In order to develop unique product and complex processes in short time, it is mandatory to reuse the acquired information in the most efficient way. Several commercial software applications are already available for managing manufacturing information, such as product lifecycle management (PLM) and manufacturing execution system (MES), but they are not integrated. The aim of this chapter is to propose a framework able to structure and relate information from design and execution of processes, especially the ones related to anomalies and critical situations occurring at the shop floor, in order to reduce the time for finalizing a new product. To this aim, a central knowledge-based system (KBS), acting as integrator between PLM and MES, has been developed. The framework has been implemented with open source systems, and has been tested in a car prototyping company.