A Semantic-Based Information Management System to Support Innovative Product Design (original) (raw)

Using Ontology and Semantic Web Tools to Improve New Product Development Process. Towards State of Arts

Lecture notes on data engineering and communications technologies, 2022

To compete, manufacturing companies need production systems that quickly respond to changes. To handle change drivers such as new product variants, re-configurability is advocated as a competitive means. To address this, New Product Development (NPD) process must be improved. New Product Development is managed by PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) software solutions. Knowledge representation and Ontology enables reasoning and has several advantages in PLM context. This paper proposes a literature review of papers related to the use of ontologies in NPD Process. The goals of this paper are to explore the field of such applications, to figure out the advantages of ontology and semantic Web in an NPD Process and to synthesize major existing Product Ontologies in terms of methodology and structuration. Finally, this paper proposes several research perspectives.

IMPROVEMENT OF THE DESIGN PROCESS BY USING SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGIES

Abstract. The collaborative work in distributed environments has a significant role in the process of virtual product design within diverse CAD/CAM systems by successfully utilizing different (semantic) Web technologies, thus decreasing the time required for bringing new products on the market and improving the knowledge transfer between business partners.

Design and Innovative Methodologies in a Semantic Framework

Volume 3: 19th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology; 1st International Conference on Micro- and Nanosystems; and 9th International Conference on Advanced Vehicle Tire Technologies, Parts A and B, 2007

Significant expenditure and effort is devoted to the never ending search for reduced product development lifecycle time and increased efficiency. The development of Semantic Web technologies promises a future where knowledge interchange is done seamlessly in open distributed environments. This paper illustrates how Semantic Web technologies in their current state of development can be effectively used to deploy an infrastructure supporting innovation principles and the engineering design processes. A mechanical design was chosen to model the initial phase of a design project using semantic ontologies. This included a set of design requirements, creating a functional model, and making use of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TIPS). The ontology development strategy is built on a combination of larger domain knowledge ontologies and simple process ontologies. Linked user requirements, engineering design, and functional modeling ontologies facilitated the application of TIPS thr...

K-CRIO: An Ontology for Organizations Involved in Product Design

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2011

The aim of this paper is to build an ontology of organizations. This ontology will be used to analyze, reason and understand organizations. The targeted organizations are those composed of individuals involved in the design of a product and, to do so, following a design process. This ontology will be used to support knowledge management within the described organizations. More specifically, the ontology will provide means for reasoning, annotating resources, monitoring design processes, enabling searches and proactively proposing tips and proper content. The presented approach is based upon the use of an existing organizational metamodel, namely CRIO, already used for the description of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) organizations. In our case, the concepts of this metamodel are used to model human activities.

A design environment for product knowledge management and data exchange

This paper reports on a distributed design environment under development for product knowledge management and information exchange. The system is able to use the company's existing base of knowledge and to push the manufacturing knowledge higher up into the design chain to reduce the need for costly and time consuming reworks and engineering changes. The design environment uses a knowledge based system Protégé and enables data/knowledge exchange through International Standards for Product Model Exchange (ISO STEP) and the Resource Description Framework.

Conceptualization of an Experimental Ontology for the Engineering Design of New Industrial Products

This paper presents the development of an ontology that supports design engineers in the conceptualisation of new industrial products by providing graphic visual searches on the Internet. To this end, the latest developments in the field of the semantic web are presented, focusing on application and business services and the various ontological criteria used. Finally, this paper shows the theoretical basis of a proposed ontology that creates a test environment in which designers and product engineers can find references during the conceptual phase of engineering design.

The Design Ontology: Foundation for the Design Knowledge Exchange and Management

Journal of Engineering Design (Taylor & Frnacis), 21: 4, pp. 427 — 454, First published on: 27 September 2008 (iFirst), 2010

The article presents the research of the nature, building and practical role of a Design Ontology as a potential framework for the more efficient product development (PD) data-, information- and knowledge- description, -explanation, -understanding and -reusing. In the methodology for development of the ontology two steps could be identified: empirical research and computer implementation. Empirical research has included domain documentation analysis (Genetic Design Model System, Mortensen 1999), identification of the key concepts and relations between them, and categorisation of the concepts and relations into taxonomies. As an epistemological foundation for the concepts formalisation, The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) proposed by IEEE, was reused. As the result of the previously described process, the ontology content has been categorised into six main subcategories divided between physical and abstract world. As a next step the computer thesaurus has been created. Using the thesauri, the knowledge evolved during the PD has been described, and the set of the created concepts and relations instances has been used for the ontology model consistency checking and refinement. The Design Ontology was evaluated through test product examples and based on this evaluation and proposed implementation framework further research steps are proposed.

Proposal of a Model-Driven Ontology for Product Development Process Interoperability and Information Sharing

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2016

The semantic interoperability of information has become increasingly important in Product Development Process (PDP) to support different phases during the product development. This article presents a proposal of an Interoperable Product Design and Manufacturing System (IPDMS) concept based on a set of engineering domain ontologies and sematic mapping approaches. The concept explores the potentials of semantic well-defined core-foundations in a Semantic Web ontology language. The formal core-foundations can be specialised to perform application view in Product or Manufacturing Model. The application view is used to support the information sharing between product design and manufacturing and verify the accordance with product requirements. A preliminary experimental has been realised, using a test case to share information from the design to manufacturing of an injection moulding plastic. As results, it was identified potential benefits and limitations. The mains contributions are: semantic interoperability during information sharing in PDP and analysis of inconsistencies in PDP.

Ontology-based Knowledge Framework for Product Development

Computer-Aided Design and Applications, 2005

Although information systems let manufacturing companies have a lot of development data, engineers do not know how to manage those huge data. So knowledge management is required to guide the engineers with comprehensive knowledge. In this paper, we propose the ontology-based knowledge framework for the product development. The framework composes of the three levels of knowledge. Lowest level is axioms, which explicitly and formally specify the semantics of concepts and relations. Middle level is a knowledge map, which defines the common domain knowledge that domain experts agree with. The knowledge map can guide engineers which design data are required for their tasks. Highest level is a specialized knowledge for domain which gives the solution of a specific task or problem. The specialized knowledge is classified into three knowledge types; expert knowledge, engineering function and data-analysis-based knowledge. The framework has a uniform representation; first order logic to integrate the three levels smoothly. We implement a prototype of the framework using prolog and test the example queries to show the effectiveness of the framework.