Capabilities, capacities, and functionalities of resources in industrial engineering

Industrial engineers decide the production organization discussing possible processes and available resources. To reason on resources, ontologies for industrial engineering need to model their characteristics. Indeed, a resource available in the shop floor can be associated with a process plan only if the resource has the capability to satisfy the plan requirements. Existing ontologies miss to characterize and distinguish the concept of capability, even when it is explicitly modeled, from other notions like capacity and functionality. We aim at filling this gap by enriching our previous work on manufacturing resources with an explicit representation of capabilities, capacities, functionalities and other related notions.