Ontologies for Architecting Circular and Sustainable Manufacturing-as-a-Service Systems

The transition to a Circular Economy (CE) is becoming increasingly popular within the manufacturing industries. State-of-the-art approaches for establishing a CE involve identifying suitable CE initiatives/strategies and subsequently assessing their circularity and sustainability performance to ensure successful implementation. This process can be quite complex and tedious for manufacturing companies aiming to employ agility principles such as Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS). The complexity arises from the need to consider all possible combinations of MaaS providers, potential suppliers, machinery, and process configurations, and to assess the sustainability of each combination. This paper aims to address this problem using a top-down approach by setting an overall sustainability score and then identifying an optimized configuration of the manufacturing ecosystem for a selected circularity initiative. We propose a solution based on a two-step methodology. The first step involves information integration and retrieval using ontology as a core model, with a sustainability score as the target. To this end, the initial ontology model integrating the concept of MaaS is implemented by extending the Industry Ontology Foundry (IOF) ontology and is evaluated using a usecase. The second step, that involves the derivation of an optimized manufacturing ecosystem using digital twins, is seen as future work.