Toward sustainable process industry based on knowledge graph: a case study of papermaking process fault diagnosis

Process industry suffers from production management in terms of efficiency promotion and waste reduction in large scale manufacturing due to poor organization of the intricate relational databases. In order to enhance the suitability of intelligent manufacturing systems in process industry, this study proposed an innovative top-down structure Knowledge Graph (KG) for process fault diagnosis, and papermaking was taken as a case study. The KG consists of a normalized seven-step-built ontology, which extracted instances of papermaking knowledge via Protégé software. The exported OWL file was imported into Neo4j software for visualization of the KG. The application in papermaking drying process for fault diagnosis shows that it can depict the material and energy flows throughout the process with a clearer relationship visualization than traditional measures. They also enable rationale search for faults and identification of their potential causes. The built KG efficiently manages the vast knowledge of the process, stores unstructured data, and promotes the intelligent development of process with high reusability and dynamicity that can rapidly import new production knowledge as well as flexibly self-updating.