Manufacturing system engineering ontology model for global extended project team

Communication, knowledge sharing and awareness of available expertise between multi-discipline project teams are complex issues. Complexity increases substantially in Extended Enterprises (EEs) / Virtual Enterprises (VEs) environments. The concepts of a Manufacturing System Engineering (MSE) moderator have previously been explored to facilitate and improve concurrent engineering design by enhancing the degree of awareness, cooperation, and coordination among engineering team members who are using shared information models and vocabularies. These concepts are now extended and adapted to the realm of EEs /VEs where inevitably individual partners will have their own terminology and information sources and may face problems and misunderstanding when different terminologies are used by particular team members. This thesis is motivated by the achievement of ontology approaches to provide common underlying standardized meta-models for semantic and syntactic interoperability. [Continues.]