Ontology-based models for design retrieval and analysis

For today's product designers, many new or improved design tools and methods have been developed to support product family design. As a result of these developments, descriptions of design data continually evolve and get revised, giving rise to compatibility and sharing issues between these tools and methods and the design repositories created to support them. Each time a design tool evolves, designers must manually modify the design repository to fit the tool's needs, and in this same context, designers must manually manage the sharing of design information. In this paper we propose an ontology-based model to partially automate the management of design tool evolution and the subsequent revision of the supporting design repository. The proposed ontology-based model assists designers in assessing design compatibility, sharing data, and ultimately ensuring "plug and play" capability for each specific design tool, leading to better design information retrieval and analysis. A case study based on a family of single-use cameras illustrates the proposed model.