Ontology-Based Representation of Heterogeneous Mechanical Systems Information for Integrated Diagnostics

During fault diagnostics of mechanical systems, information fusion methods were widely used to improve the reliability. However, diagnostic information comes from all life cycle of a mechanical device and they are always heterogeneous. Whereas heterogeneous information is difficult to be interconnecting, intercommunicating and inter-operating, so how to represent heterogeneous information is a key problem in integrated diagnostics. In this paper, a novel ontology-based representation method of heterogeneous diagnostic information is presented in detail. Firstly it introduces basic principles of ontology-based modeling. Then three methods of ontology-based information modeling are studied respectively. In the end an example of ontology-based modeling for a diesel engine is given.