Tribo-informatics: Concept, architecture, and case study

Friction plays a vital role in energy dissipation, device failure, and even energy supply in modern society. After years of research, data and information on tribology research are becoming increasingly available. Because of the strong systematic and multi-disciplinary coupling characteristics of tribology, tribology information is scattered in various disciplines with different patterns, e.g., technical documents, databases, and papers, thereby increasing the information entropy of the system, which is inconducive to the preservation and circulation of research information. With the development of computer and information science and technology, many subjects have begun to be combined with information technology, and multi-disciplinary informatics has been born. This paper describes the combination of information technology with tribology research, presenting the connotation and architecture of tribo-informatics, and providing a case study on implementing the proposed concept and architecture. The proposal and development of tribo-informatics described herein will improve the research efficiency and optimize the research process of tribology, which is of considerable significance to the development of this field.