Ontology driven certification of pressure equipments

Standards and engineering codes rule design, construction and operation of chemical plant equipments to ensure reliability and safety. In this paper, we exploit knowledge-based methodologies and technologies to guarantee safety rules compliance of pressure equipments. Specifically, we describe a knowledge-based tool defined on top of a knowledge-based CAD system, which can serve inspection bodies, i.e., for certification purposes, and pressure equipment designers for the verification of the appropriate safety normative (i.e., the Pressure Equipment Directive). The paper focuses on the knowledge base of the tool, which has been formalized through the PED&I (Pressure Equipment Design and Inspection) Ontology. The ontology has been enriched by logical axioms, which ensure the consistency of the knowledge base, and by reasoning rules, which enable to infer new relationships among the class instances stored in the ontology.