Overview

In the broad field of Product Development, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is of great importance to the design and manufacturing part throughout the whole process. The development of ontological assembly representation was initiated from several considerations concerning assembly representation for PLM. Ontological representation, due to its inherent advantages, can help achieve high interoperability level that enables efficient implementation of PLM and identify a common data structure to allow data exchange between platforms. There are several kinds of software that is able to perform ontology-based modeling and analysis, and Protégé is a commonly used and powerful tool in this area. To make this idea more clear, this report will choose a typical assembly case, namely a reduction gearbox, build the corresponding ontology and explore the ontology assembly model by using related plug-ins.