Ontology re-engineering: a case study from the automotive industry

For over twenty five years Ford has been utilizing an AI-based system to manage process planning for vehicle assembly at our assembly plants around the world. The scope of the AI system, known originally as the Direct Labor Management System and now as the Global Study Process Allocation System (GSPAS), has increased over the years to include additional functionality on Ergonomics and Powertrain Assembly (Engines and Transmission plants). The knowledge about Ford's manufacturing processes is contained in an ontology originally developed using the KL-ONE representation language and methodology. To preserve the viability of the GSPAS ontology and to make it easily usable for other applications within Ford, we needed to re-engineer and convert the KL-ONE ontology into a semantic web OWL/RDF format. In this paper, we will discuss the process by which we re-engineered the existing GSPAS KL-ONE ontology and deployed Semantic Web technology in our application.