Semantic Graph Unification for Industrial Digital Threads: Bridging 11 Heterogeneous Manufacturing Systems Through Ontology-Driven Knowledge Graphs

Abstract

Modern manufacturing enterprises operate heterogeneous systems -- ERP, MES, PLM, SCADA, QMS, SCM -- each with its own data model and API. The resulting silos prevent holistic analysis, delay root-cause investigation, and obstruct Industry 4.0 traceability. Point-to-point integration scales as O(n^2) and accumulates brittle dependencies. This paper presents an open framework for semantic graph unification of industrial digital threads. An ontology-driven RDF knowledge graph unifies data from 11 simulated sources across nine domains through a five-stage ETL pipeline with automated entity resolution spanning 97 owl:sameAs identity links. The ontology encompasses 78 RDFS classes, 108 object properties, and 243 data properties, drawing on ISA-95, OPC UA, eClass, the Asset Administration Shell, RAMI 4.0, and additional standards. An automated discovery engine applies nine strategy categories -- cross-station correlation, alarm coverage, ECN impact, CUSUM/EWMA drift detection -- to surface insights spanning system boundaries. The primary empirical result: blocking 24 cross-system tools reduces recall from 1.00 to 0.31 (F1 from 1.00 to 0.48), showing that 69% of discoverable signals require cross-system graph joins. Leave-one-out ablation confirms six of nine strategies contribute unique signals. Verification against a 65-signal manifest (16 positive, 49 null) yields F1 = 1.00 (95% Clopper-Pearson CI [0.79, 1.00]); as the manifest was author-constructed, this constitutes verification not independent validation. The graph is exposed to LLM agents via 287 Model Context Protocol tools as a SPARQL-native semantic layer. Five industry templates (aerospace, CPG, pharma, medical devices, turbine blades) demonstrate schema stability across manufacturing verticals.