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Constraint capture and maintenance in engineering design

Constraint capture and maintenance in engineering design
Constraint capture and maintenance in engineering design
The Designers' Workbench is a system, developed by the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) consortium to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, to ensure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company's design rule book(s). In the principal application discussed here, the evolving design is described against a jet engine ontology. Design rules are expressed as constraints over the domain ontology. Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench's knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a system, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. Further we hypothesize that in order to appropriately apply, maintain and reuse constraints, it is necessary to understand the underlying assumptions and context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to them as “application conditions” and these form a part of the rationale associated with the constraint. We propose a methodology to capture the application conditions associated with a constraint and demonstrate that an explicit representation (machine interpretable format) of application conditions (rationales) together with the corresponding constraints and the domain ontology can be used by a machine to support maintenance of constraints. Support for the maintenance of constraints includes detecting inconsistencies, subsumption, redundancy, fusion between constraints and suggesting appropriate refinements. The proposed methodology provides immediate benefits to the designers and hence should encourage them to input the application conditions (rationales).
Application Conditions, Capture, Constraints, Design, Maintenance, Rationales
325-343
Ajit, Suraj
3b27537e-54d0-432e-828e-a4d6ee2aadbc
Sleeman, Derek
9ede413a-aca9-4bf7-bb65-dc0b0f398f0a
Fowler, David W
20600aae-3dc2-4a5f-98fe-5c1dd02ad792
Knott, David
5a332944-162b-4fc0-ab81-4ff053bb2982
Ajit, Suraj
3b27537e-54d0-432e-828e-a4d6ee2aadbc
Sleeman, Derek
9ede413a-aca9-4bf7-bb65-dc0b0f398f0a
Fowler, David W
20600aae-3dc2-4a5f-98fe-5c1dd02ad792
Knott, David
5a332944-162b-4fc0-ab81-4ff053bb2982

Ajit, Suraj, Sleeman, Derek, Fowler, David W and Knott, David (2008) Constraint capture and maintenance in engineering design. AI EDAM, 22, 325-343.

Record type: Article

Abstract

The Designers' Workbench is a system, developed by the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) consortium to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, to ensure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company's design rule book(s). In the principal application discussed here, the evolving design is described against a jet engine ontology. Design rules are expressed as constraints over the domain ontology. Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench's knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a system, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. Further we hypothesize that in order to appropriately apply, maintain and reuse constraints, it is necessary to understand the underlying assumptions and context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to them as “application conditions” and these form a part of the rationale associated with the constraint. We propose a methodology to capture the application conditions associated with a constraint and demonstrate that an explicit representation (machine interpretable format) of application conditions (rationales) together with the corresponding constraints and the domain ontology can be used by a machine to support maintenance of constraints. Support for the maintenance of constraints includes detecting inconsistencies, subsumption, redundancy, fusion between constraints and suggesting appropriate refinements. The proposed methodology provides immediate benefits to the designers and hence should encourage them to input the application conditions (rationales).

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More information

Published date: 2008
Keywords: Application Conditions, Capture, Constraints, Design, Maintenance, Rationales
Organisations: Electronics & Computer Science

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 271806
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/271806
PURE UUID: d6a46506-27c9-4c37-bac5-36a06bede386

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 17 Dec 2010 15:38
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 09:39

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Contributors

Author: Suraj Ajit
Author: Derek Sleeman
Author: David W Fowler
Author: David Knott

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