Ontologies for interoperating sustainable manufacturing: New opportunities for the automotive sector

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Sustainability is a key issue in every production activity. At the same time, interoperability of the production processes is almost crucial to the most advanced manufacturing processes, particularly for the automotive sector because of its incidence on overall impact on environment. A new question then arise, quite new indeed: how and to which extent the sustainability of processes can be assured in a more complex scenario of interoperating enterprises? The reason is the variety of regions and thus rules, habits and praxes that might be involved along the product life-cycle. In the paper, a possible solution to achieve sustainability of interoperating manufacturing processes is presented. The solution is based on the most advanced artificial intelligence tools: ontologies. The problem here faced is how to structure and design an ontology-based system for supporting decisions assuring sustainable solutions within an interoperability framework. The system devised as well as the consequent structure adopted are discussed by the grace of an example of a simple automotive component. Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.