A Decision Support Ontology for collaborative decision making in engineering design

Complex products and increasing domain specialization have led to a collaborative design environment in which multiple partners are relied upon to successfully realize a product. In such an environment there is a need for computational frameworks that assist in communicating decision making knowledge. In this research a Decision Support Ontology (DSO) is developed to facilitate decision making within collaborative design. The structure of the information model developed reflects a priori knowledge of decision making and supports the communication of information independent of any specific decision method. Accordingly, the DSO includes decision-related information such as the design issue, alternatives, evaluation, criteria and preferences. It also includes decision rationale and assumptions, as well as any constraints created by the decision and the decision outcome. The DSO is built upon the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which facilitates the sharing and integration of decision-making information between multiple collaborators via the Web and Description Logic. Although the information model developed is based on engineering design literature, the DSO captures generic decision information, and therefore could be adapted to be used beyond the engineering design domain.