Conceptual Modeling of Collaborative Intelligent Manufacturing For Customized Products: An Ontological Approach

Mass customization is implemented to provide outstanding service to customers with diverse tastes and preferences. However, mass customization has limitations in the traditional value chain and production paradigm. Taking advantage of advanced information technology, such as manufacturing grid and virtual enterprise, to facilitate mass customization and improve the customer perceived valued of mass customization raises a challenge issue. To achieve an ideal mass customization, the customer’s needs should be identified and met by the collaborative manufacturing from several manufacturers. Comprehensive conceptual models corresponding to the collaborative manufacturing for customized products are essential to understand how the collaborative process can apply in customized production, and facilitate early detection and correction of system development errors. In this paper, an ontology is described via a customized bicycle buying scenario to describe how to use an ontology for collaborative manufacturing. This ontological approach provides understanding of the domain, which can be used as a unifying framework to represent the selected phenomena for conceptual model.