An ontology-driven visualization model for production monitoring systems

Abstract

Contemporary production monitoring systems tend to focus on the integration of information of manufacturing from the field level, production level to the enterprise level. They are desktop based and provides static interface for all the users while requiring a lot of hardcoding logic. The production monitoring system developed by us brings new concepts and ideas such as its mobile platform. Moreover, its adaptive information visualization of the information that takes the context of user into account is expected to improve the usability of the system. This adaptivity feature is realized by the designed ontology-driven visualization model in this thesis. The visualization model contains sufficient information about the context, user, device, tasks and interface thanks to the powerful semantic technology-ontology. Furthermore, ontology allows defining rules and reasoning for the relationships of the concepts in the visualization model. Hence the logic and intelligence of the adaptivity is separated out of the interface application itself instead of hardcoding. In order to validate the designed the visualization model and methodology, several adaptation effects are realized by integrating the visualization model in the project for our test bed-Fastory production line, which is a cell phone assembly line. This thesis provides a complete approach for the design of the visualization model, including the design of adaptation effects, user modelling and logic by ontology. Finally, the test of the visualization model is demonstrated.