Application Integration of Simulation Tools Considering Domain Specific Knowledge

Because of the increasing complexity of modern production processes, it is necessary to plan these processes virtually before realizing them in a real environment. On the one hand there are specialized simulation tools simulating a specific production technique with exactness close to the real object of the simulation. On the other hand there are simulations which simulate whole production processes, but often do not achieve prediction accuracy comparable to the specialized tools. The simulation of a production process as a whole achieving the needed accuracy is hard to realize. Incompatible file formats, different semantics used to describe the simulated objects and missing data consistency are the main causes of this integration problem. In this paper, a framework is presented that enables the interconnection of simulation tools of production engineering considering the specific knowledge of a certain domain (e.g. material processing). Therefore, an ontology-based integration approach using domain specific knowledge to identify necessary semantic transformations has been realized. The framework provides generic functionality which, if concretized for a domain, enables the system to integrate any domain specific simulation tool in the process.