TEMPORAL EVENT-DRIVEN SCHEDULED ACTIONS (TESA) ONTOLOGY FOR CYBER PHYSICAL SYSTEMS WITH PRIORITY MECHANISM

Abstract

This study aims to create a lightweight ontology to extend OWL time with scheduling and event-driven actions, which is critical for the tightly coupled complex systems modeling during the design of cyber-physical programs like Digital Twins. In addition, the developed ontology should be compatible with foundational ontologies like BFO, SUMO, UFO, and DOLCE. Moreover, the priority mechanism for resolving conflicted actions should be created for the new ontology. The subject of this paper is the development and evaluation of ontologies with scheduling and conflict-resolving mechanisms. This paper aims to develop and evaluate a new ontology that provides scheduling and event-driven actions with conflict resolution mechanisms and is compatible with foundational ontologies. The primary focus was on limiting the halts created by conflicted actions during the ontology reasoner run. The tasks to be solved are as follows: to collect the requirements for the new ontology, to describe core elements of the ontology-modeled system to be compatible with foundational ontologies, and to describe and evaluate new ontology. Methods involve designing the test system for the testing, its formalization for modeling the system using proposed and other ontologies, and software engineering techniques to run and collect the data during experiments. The results demonstrate that the proposed TESA achieves a significant reduction in cognitive and developmental effort, characterized by a 70% decrease in Halstead effort metrics compared to ISO-standard PSL and prevents the reasoner from facing halts during reasoning. Under high-density conflict scenarios, TESA exhibited superior temporal stability, sustaining sub-second reasoning latency while traditional methodologies underwent exponential performance degradation, with execution times exceeding 10 seconds. Moreover, the proposed ontology is lightweight and easily compatible with foundational ontologies. Conclusions. For the first time, a lightweight ontology for event scheduling and conflict preventing has been developed that strikes a balance between detailed semantics and ease of integration. TESA’s modular structure and reduced semantic overhead enable streamlined adoption and usage with foundational ontologies. At the same time, TESA goes beyond minimal standards like iCalendar by incorporating sufficient domain-neutral semantics for tasks, events, and resource constraints, thereby facilitating more robust scheduling logic. Future tasks in the field of TESA development include refining the ontology’s modular structure for specialized domains, exploring automated alignment techniques with other foundational ontologies on higher level, investigating multi-factor priority mechanisms, and scalability mechanisms for the usage in heterogeneous scheduling environments.