Digital continuity, consistency and interoperability in the product life cycle with graph-based design languages

The digital Continuity (of processes), consistency (of data) and interoperability (of software tools) along the entire product life cycle (PLC) are central aspirations in the future digitalization in the entire information processing of Industry 4.0 for development and production. However, the status quo is still characterized by buzzwords such as silos, data lakes, knowledge islands and fragmentation of data and software, to name just a few of the obstacles in digitalization. This is essentially because in today’s industrial processes the flow of information has grown over many years and is distributed across disciplines, companies and software systems. As a result, many areas have developed their own software systems in the past, often using proprietary "native" data formats, which make an efficient and consistent exchange of data between different areas with different data formats difficult or even impossible. A central component in the successful establishment and implementation of a strategy for Industry 4.0 here is consistent and end-to-end data exchange based on modern model-based methods of information exchange with ontologies. © 2023 The Authors.