(408f) Constructing Ontologies for Controlled Plants

Constructing Ontologies for Controlled Plants

Heinz A Preisig
Dept of Chemical Engineering
NTNU
Trondheim, Norway

The computer-aided modelling project [1], which has become the hallmark of our group's activity, aims at generating a component-based toolbox so we can build a zoo of computational objects [2][3], suitable to solve most of the computational engineering task we meet in our profession and beyond.

We want to construct the tools such the they enable inter-disciplinary work [4], thus impose minimal limitations on the application domain. We aim at increased productivity by making things simple on the basis from which we can assemble gradually complex problems. The user shall be in charge not the technology should impose; no repetitions, proper, and focus on the modelling and not on the technology to generate the code.

Domains we aiming at are process industry: conceptional design, simulation, flow-sheeting, detailed design, mechanical design, planning, scheduling and control [1]. Materials engineering: materials design across the scales, chemistry, crystallography, metallurgy, polymer sciences ... Mechanical engineering: computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing.

Currently we are working on a multi-scale modelling problem that attempts to reconstruct the mechanical behaviour of polyurethane foams. On the lowest level of the Framework 7 project we have quantum mechanic models, extending to molecular dynamics, meso-scale models to macroscopic flow models and mechanical properties models [4].

The ontology for which we have constructed a set of tools, is currently used for the description of controlled physical/chemical/biological processes and we are in the process of extending the domain to multi-scale processes of the Framework 7 project MoDeNa. Objective in this domain is to generate a standard for the model representation, which is a subset of definitions and equations extracted from the ontology and augmented with the instantiation information and possibly input data, surrogate models and solver information.

We use the term ontology for a mathematical representation of model components, which include containment information, information about what is in the containment and characteristics of all components. The first layer defines the basis build on the foundation of containment with tokens living in it all in a frame like time and space.

The presentation will focus on the foundation of the ontology, the underlying ideas and a representation of one of the ontologies we generated in our ontology-construction tool.

  1. Preisig, H. A. Constructing and maintaining proper process models Comp & Chem Eng, 2010, 34(9), 1543-1555
  2. Elve, Arne Tobias; Ontology Design for Representation of mathematical models MSc Thesis, NTNU, Trondheim Feb 2015
  3. Preisig, H. A. A multi-layered ontology for physical-chemical-biological processes ESCAPE 21 (2011), Porto Carras, Chalkidiki, Greece, 2011, 1, ISBN 978-0-444-53711-9, 101-105
  4. MoDeNa project website. Retrieved May 11, 2015 from http://www.modenaproject.eu/