An Ontology of Manufacturing Knowledge for Design Decision Support

Product design needs many kinds of knowledge which may be derived from marketing, manufacturing, assembly, sales, delivery, maintenance, and disposal. Manufacturing knowledge is one of the most important sources for the efficient and effective support to product design decisions. This paper proposes an ontological approach to analyzing what kinds of manufacturing knowledge the design decisions need. The commonly-used methodology is adopted for the ontology development. The work, firstly, focuses on the identification of all the design activities along with the Pahl and Beitz's engineering design process including planning and task clarification, conceptual design, embodiment design, and detail design. Moreover, related manufacturing knowledge, which are classified into three categories such as machine, material, and manufacturing processes, for design support are also identified along with the identification process of different design activities. Then, the ontology is constructed by using the software Protege and some results are illustrated. Finally, some conclusions and future works are presented.