Chapter 1: Ontologies and information models

Title: Development of Formal Ontology for Product Design Lifecycle

Author(s): Mini P Kesavadas, Amit Paygude, Karthik Bandi, T. Kesavadas

Address: Lateral Eye Inc. Clarence, NY 14032 USA | Lateral Eye Inc. Clarence, NY 14032 USA | Lateral Eye Inc. Clarence, NY 14032 USA | University at Buffalo Buffalo, NY 14260 USA

Reference: International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 2005 pp. 3 - 9

Abstract/Summary: Product Lifecycle Management, in theory, allows companies to integrate various activities associated with product development, starting from market needs to, design and development of products to maintenance of products to retiring a product when the product no longer meets the need for which it was designed. However today there is a surprising lack of agreement on formal definitions about what constitutes these various steps and how these changes during the course of time. Our approach to this problem is through applying the concepts of ontological engineering. In this paper, we propose a formal basic ontology that is sufficiently generic to encompass the semantics, relationships and constraints of design artifacts to encapsulate design and manufacturing intent and rationale. Our approach will significantly reduce the problem of interoperability in downstream product development and sharing of manufacturing knowledge, effect of design on quality etc from system integrators through its’ value chain. We will also introduce a new tool called PrOnto ™, under development at Lateral Eye that helps in building the proposed formal ontology of the product life cycle.

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