Department of Business Administration, Technology and Social Sciences

This paper presents a comparison of two previous and separate efforts to develop an ontology in the engineering design domain, together with an ontology proposal from which ontologies for a specific application may be derived. The research contrasts an empirical, user-centered approach to developing ontology - the Engineering Design Integrated Taxonomies (EDIT), with a theoretical approach in which concepts and relations are elicited from engineering design theories - the Design Ontology (DO). The limitations and advantages of each approach are discussed. The research methodology adopted is to map the ontology through examining each of the concepts and relations contained within each of the ontologies DO and EDIT with respect to the other. The comparison process results in an examination of both ontologies, with a few changes resulting from this. The importance of the two different approaches, one that is theoretically sound and another that is applicable, is recognized and argued. Finally, the merged ontology for engineering design is proposed as a template ontology that can be tailored by researchers and practitioners for a specific context.

The article presents the research of the nature, building and practical role of a Design Ontology as a potential framework for the more efficient product development (PD) data-, information- and knowledge- description, -explanation, -understanding and -reusing. In the methodology for development of the ontology two steps could be identified: empirical research and computer implementation. Empirical research has included domain documentation analysis (Genetic Design Model System, Mortensen 1999), identification of the key concepts and relations between them, and categorisation of the concepts and relations into taxonomies. As an epistemological foundation for the concepts formalisation, The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) proposed by IEEE, was reused. As the result of the previously described process, the ontology content has been categorised into six main subcategories divided between physical and abstract world. As a next step the computer thesaurus has been created. Using the thesauri, the knowledge evolved during the PD has been described, and the set of the created concepts and relations instances has been used for the ontology model consistency checking and refinement. The Design Ontology was evaluated through test product examples and based on this evaluation and proposed implementation framework further research steps are proposed.

This paper proposes a Behaviour Prediction Framework with an objective to help designers tackling the problem of uncertainty emerging from system architecture and the effects of the uncertain operating conditions. The proposed framework combines structural and dynamic system model. The Design Structure Matrix is applied to model structural arrangements and dependencies between the subsystems. The Model Predictive Control is applied to model the system in discrete and continuous dynamic domains. As the result of the proposed framework, stability analysis of subsystems in interaction become possible and feedback on system architecture could be provided. To test validity of the proposed approach, the test case involving climate chamber with heat regeneration is presented.

Paper presents a genetic algorithm based approach for synthesis of truss structure designs. Genotype represented as a collection of binary encoded nodes is decoded into the phenotype by applying the NodeSort algorithm. A genotype extension to consider a cross-section as variable and variable length chromosomes to produce designs to successfully meet the boundary conditions are all being incorporated into the NodeSort to provide an efficient truss structures synthesis framework. The introduction of multi-objective optimisation using NSGA-II will help to address more real life engineering problems.

The computational design synthesis approach considered in this paper, proposes directed multigraph and graph grammar-based models of technical processes and technical process synthesis. The theory of technical systems, which is adopted as a theoretical foundation for this work, assumes a teleological viewpoint bringing together the purpose of technical systems and fulfilment of customer demands and societal needs. These demands and needs are met by means of a technical process inside which the operands are transformed with the assistance of a technical system to achieve a desired state. Formal models of technical processes and technical process synthesis establish the foundation for further application of search algorithms to support early engineering design. The engineering knowledge about technical processes is provided within a set of graph grammar rules. As the result of the proposed approach, the designer is enabled to consider different operand transformations in an expedient fashion with the possibility of the generation of novel alternatives. The proposed approach is illustrated through an example of the design of a stiffened panel assembly line involving welding and riveting as two basic principles.

Traceability of information provides the basis for assessing the credibility of engineering information, better understanding it, and making judgments about the appropriateness of its use for a particular design task. The presented research attempts to answer how the proposed traceability methodology and framework could help designers to improve communication, eventually create new channels of communication, and contribute to the creation of shared understanding in collaborative design processes. The discussion of these issues is based on a literature review, empirical research, observations of industrial practice, and feedback from initial implementation. The research is focused on information objects (IOs), archetypically represented in the engineering domain as technical documents that are often complex structures constituted of textual, numerical, and graphical fragments. The presented approach is based on an abstraction of IOs’ relationships organized around specific contexts that are defined by a subset of product development ontology. Each IO could be repeatedly represented in various contexts thatmay contain different subsets of objects and their relationships. Such a representation also acts as a container in which the ontology concept instances are associated with IOs being developed and traced during the design episode. The usage of the proposed traceability methodology is discussed with examples of implementation and possible utilization situations. The paper is focused on explaining how the developed functionalities could help to resolve manifestations of inadequate information flow, which cause communication barriers in engineering companies. In addition, the proposed traceability methodology offers the possibility to record the detailed history of actions and events associated with IOs in the usage process of the product life cycle management systems. Based on the research findings, this paper argues that such a network of the traceability links and relationships may be viewed as a novel design communication channel.

The analysis of complex interlinked datasets poses a significant problem for design researchers. This is addressed by proposing an information visualisation method for analysing patterns of design activity, qualitatively and quantitatively, with respect to time. This method visualises the temporality of interrelations between interlinked variables and, as such, can be applied to a range of datasets. By providing a statistical analysis of the networks' growth the proposed method allows for the modelling of complex patterns of activity. Throughout, the method is demonstrated with respect to a fully realised example of information seeking activity. The core contribution of the proposed method is in supporting the analysis of activity with respect to both macro and micro level temporal interactions between variables.