A Preliminary Discussion of Semantic Web Technologies and 3D Feature Recognition to Support the Complex Parts Manufacturing Quotation: An Aerospace Industry Case

The complexity of airplane parts is constantly increasing. For example, the airplane fuselage comprises more than 700.000 parts with different dimensions, geometries, tolerances complexity, and multiple materials. This complexity scenario requires an advanced manufacturing park with conventional and non-conventional machining, rapid manufacturing machining, 3D measuring machines, and others. In parallel, reducing these parts’ cost and production time challenges the aerospace industry suppliers, ensuring high manufacturing quality. Therefore, this paper explores a preliminary discussion of the Semantic Web Technologies and 3D feature recognition application to assist the complex parts manufacturing pricing and manufacturing planning since this process is made manually by a manufacturing engineer. During all quotation processes (3D part analysis, manufacturing planning, and manufacturing price definition), the engineer spends more than one week to quote a part depending on its complexity. This paper contributes to a Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) domain since it discusses the application of Semantic web technologies and 3D feature recognition technologies to automate extracting the information from the part modelled in 3D and plan the manufacturing process to help to identify the price to manufacture it. Finally, the main research result concerns the identification of the contributions and limitations of the related works in this domain and the research opportunity to cover this research gap.