Supporting the engineering design process with Semantic Web technology

Abstract

In engineering, knowledge is generated when designing a product, but very limited useful information is normally stored during and after the design process. Although information is recorded in design document, emails, and meeting minutes, this still does not provide effective support for future engineering designers. It is apparent that even with the considerable amount of research, the design community has failed to make full use of design rationale capture in real-world projects. This is not because there is reason to doubt the potential usefulness of capturing and delivering design rationale, but instead because of excessive time, labor, cost, and project disruption that is required to make both capture and delivery of design rationale effective. In this thesis the author first introduces a flexible ontology-based schema based on the evolutional decision making model with formally defined semantics that enables the capture and reuse of design knowledge, supported by advanced knowledge and intelligent systems. As part of the work, a service oriented, loosely coupled engineering design system framework is developed. The major issue is the representation and capture of design rationale for design management and for use in a re-design or related design. In this thesis, we describe an approach to a rationale system, Semantic Web based Design Rationale System (SW-DRS) which consists of three parts: (i) an ontology based argumentation representation, (ii) a knowledge based design rationale database, (iii) a design artifact model. In addition, it is demonstrated that the design rationale within a real world project can be captured for evaluating with the research objectives. Finally, we evaluate SW-DRS with a similar design rationale system, DRed, and conclude that the approach taken by SW-DRS will be beneficial to design engineering.

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