Project KnowDrift

The project KnowDrift applies a knowledge intensive cyber-physical systems (CPS) approach for realising an innovative automated robotic system to overcome limitations of the state-of-the-art solutions. The usage of machine-interpretable semantics (ontologies) to describe the concepts of manufacturing systems overcomes current interoperability barriers and enables intelligent software components to perform reasoning and infer sufficient knowledge to interact. In this context, the ontological representation of the product model enables these components to autonomously reason about the used concepts linking automatically between product models, production processes and production equipment. Moreover, using an ontology-driven solution in combination with the CPS, as it is proposed in this project, offers a direction towards solving the interoperability problems within the manufacturing life cycle as well as between software applications, which involves process planning, process modelling, scheduling and the workflow. Besides, a developed HMI should enable a better supervision and understanding of the CPS. The project will demonstrate the approach in two diverse industrial pilot test cases provided by the industrial partners TELE and Babitsch. In order to successfully conduct the proposed project, the PRIA research team will merge its competencies with the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics, and Cybernetics, which has a large experience in the development of knowledge-based systems and agent technology, as well as with an SME Dokulil that has decades of know how in implementing industrial robotics projects.