Wednesday, 5/23/2007
11:45 AM - 12:15 PM
Level: Case Study

Besides the reduction of time to market, there may be observed another trend in the automotive industry: built-to-order. Built-to-order reduces the mass production of cars to a limited-lot-production. Emphasis for optimization issues moves then from the production step to earlier steps as the collaboration of suppliers and manufacturer in development and delivery. Thus such knowledge has to be shared between different organizations and departments in early development processes. In the session we describe a project in the automotive industry where ontologies have two main purposes: (i) representing and sharing knowledge to optimize business processes for the development of cars and (ii) integration of life data into this process. A system is built on top of an inference engine equipped with an ontology containing information about parts and their mutual interrelationships. In many cases these interrelationships are described by rules. This formal representation may then be compared with the concrete real car or part of a car. Thus ontologies describe the model for the behavior which can be tested in reality. This system accelerates the development of cars and parts of it and thus reduces time to market.

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Angele is currently CEO and CTO of ontoprise GmbH, which he cofounded in 1999. In 1994 he became a full professor in applied computer science at the University of Applied Sciences, Braunschweig, Germany. From 1989 to 1994 he was a research and teaching assistant at the University of Karlsruhe, Institute AIFB. He did research on the execution of the knowledge acquisition and representation language KARL, which led to a Ph.D. (Dr. rer. pol.) from the University of Karlsruhe in 1993. From 1985 to 1989 he worked for the companies AEG, Konstanz, Germany, and SEMA GROUP, Ulm, Germany. He received the diploma degree in computer science in 1985 from the University of Karlsruhe. He published around 90 papers in books and journals, and as book, conference, and workshop contributions. Topics were about semantic web, semantic technologies, knowledge representation, and their practical applications. He is leading several research and commercial projects. He gave more than 55 courses at Berufsakademien, Fachhochschulen and Universities about: expert systems, software engineering, world wide web, database systems, digital image analysis, computer graphics, and mathematics. He supervised around 30 master's theses and Ph.Ds.