• IE interfaces
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.40-51
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• 2012

Today, many manufacturing companies realize that collaboration is crucial for their survival. Especially, in the perspective of quality, the importance of collaboration is emphasized because economic loss increases exponentially while defective parts go through the process in supply chain. However, the manufacturing companies are facing two main difficulties in implementing collaborative relationships with their suppliers. First, it is difficult for the suppliers to produce reliable products due to their obsolete facilities. The problem gets worse for second- or third-tire vendors. Second, the companies experience the lack of universally understandable set of terminology and effective methodologies for knowledge representation. Ontology is one of the best approaches to expressing and processing a domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose the manufacturing ontology-based quality prediction framework to represent and share the knowledge of industrial environment and to predict product quality in manufacturing processes. In addition, we develop the ontology-based quality prediction system based on the proposed framework. We carried out a series of experiments for an injection molding process at an automotive part supplier. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed framework and system can be successfully applicable in manufacturing industry.