Ontological product modeling for collaborative design
Conrad E. Bock, XuanFang Zha, Hyo-Won Suh, Jae-Hyun Lee · 2009
This paper presents a product modeling language for collaborative design that has the benefits of ontology and expanded capabilities in conventional product modeling.The proposed approach uses ontology to increase flexibility and accuracy in combining, refining, and checking consistency of requirements and designs from multiple, disparate sources, and model-based approaches to develop more powerful, engineering-friendly languages for using ontology.It can capture partial and high-level models in early stages of design, as well as more complete and detailed models in later stages, and supports reliable interpretation of models across the product lifecycle.Examples are given in a proof-of-concept implementation.Designers distributed geographically and organizationally in global economies worsen the above problems [Sriram 2006].Multiple firms coordinate to develop and exchange product descriptions.In these situations, designers cannot rely on informal discussion to combine separate contributions to the same product definition, or resolve differences in how product models are interpreted.Product information assets become fragile and return less on investment.This paper addresses the challenges above by applying ontological and model-based techniques to expanded capabilities in product modeling languages.Ontologies bring an "open world" approach that enables independently developed product models to partially describe the same products, with the precision needed to check consistency when the models are combined, and to ensure uniform interpretation.Model-based techniques provide engineering-friendly languages, freeing engineers from learning the specifics of ontology languages, while still having their benefits.This paper applies these techniques to expanded capabilities in product modeling, such as capturing the environment in which engineered devices are to be used, supporting taxonomies of products and behaviors, and giving interconnection of subassemblies and parts the same capabilities as subassemblies and parts.These improvements enable different or overlapping aspects of product information to be developed separately, or built on each other, then assembled rapidly and flexibly with the aid of automated consistency checking.They achieve this by bringing more relevant information about the product together in a uniform representation.The results are closer to engineering intention and applicable to a wider range of engineering tasks than earlier approaches.Previous work in product modeling takes either an ontological or model-based approach, but usually not both.Those using only model-based techniques do not support independently developed product models for the same product (open world), or the precision needed to check consistency when the models are combined, while those taking only an ontological approach do not provide engineering-friendly modeling languages.In addition, previous work with ontology in product modeling does not take full advantage of ontology, such as open world semantics, while previous work using modelbased techniques does not support many of the needed capabilities, such as interconnection of subassemblies and parts with the same capabilities as subassemblies and parts.The few previous combinations of ontology and model-based techniques support only some of their potential synergies.The paper covers the most general aspects of product modeling within the above scope, such as product taxonomies, interconnections of parts and subassemblies, and relating behavior to structure.It does not address or restrict: Processes by which product models are developed, or representing such processes ("design" as a verb). More detailed topics such as kinematics, tolerances, and detailed behavior, geometry, and material models. Other stages of the product lifecycle besides design, such as fabrication, maintenance, and disposal.The approaches of this paper will be applied to the above topics in future work, see Section .6 2 Section 2 gives requirements on product models and the proposed language.Section 3 covers previous work on these requirements.Section 4 covers the language with brief introductions to ontology and model-based architecture.Section 5 describes a proof-ofconcept implementation of the language.Section 6 gives future work and Section 7 concludes the paper. Requirements on Product Models and Languages for CollaborationProduct modeling languages are engineered just as products are.Languages have requirements and alternative ways of satisfying them.Language requirements are naturally intertwined with the kinds of models expected to be constructed by engineers or other stakeholders.This section takes scenario of collaborative design described in Section 1 to determine characteristics of typical product models, and requirements on product modeling languages.Section 2.1 discusses product models as they are constructed by engineers or other stakeholders in a collaborative way, while Section 2.2 addresses requirements on languages used to construct these models.The requirements are addressed by the language proposed in Section 4, where ontological techniques are applied to satisfy the concerns of Section 2.1, and model-based approaches to satisfy those of Section 2.2.