Ontologies in System Engineering: a Field Report

TL;DR

This paper reviews how ontologies are increasingly used in system engineering to improve tasks like design, monitoring, and diagnosis, highlighting their benefits and limitations through four case studies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive field report on four applications of ontologies in system engineering, detailing methodologies, tools, and results.

Findings

Ontologies enhance system design, monitoring, and diagnosis.

They offer improvements over traditional ad-hoc techniques.

Limitations include challenges in integration and scalability.

Abstract

In recent years ontologies enjoyed a growing popularity outside specialized AI communities. System engineering is no exception to this trend, with ontologies being proposed as a basis for several tasks in complex industrial implements, including system design, monitoring and diagnosis. In this paper, we consider four different contributions to system engineering wherein ontologies are instrumental to provide enhancements over traditional ad-hoc techniques. For each application, we briefly report the methodologies, the tools and the results obtained with the goal to provide an assessment of merits and limits of ontologies in such domains.