An Ontology for Reusable and Executable Decision Templates

Abstract

Engineering design is increasingly recognized as a decision making process. Providing decision support is crucial to augment designers' decision-making capability in this process. In this paper, we present a template-based ontological method that integrates the decision-making mechanism with problem-specific information; thus, it can provide design decision support from both the “construct” and the “information” perspectives. The “construct,” namely, decision-making mechanism, is the utility-based Decision Support Problem (u-sDSP), which is a rigorous mathematical model that facilitates designers making multi-attribute selection decisions under uncertainty, while the information for decision making is archived as u-sDSP templates and represented using frame-based ontology to facilitate reuse, execution, and consistency-maintaining. This paper is an extension of our earlier work on the ontological modeling of the compromise decisions. The unique advantage of this ontology is that it captures both the declarative and procedural knowledge of selection decisions and represents them separately, thus facilitating designers reusing, executing previous documented decision knowledge to effect new decisions. The efficacy of ontology is demonstrated using a rapid prototyping (RP) resource selection example.

Ontology-Based Representation of Design Decision Hierarchies

“…The core of PDSIDES is an ontology (specification of a conceptualization [20]) that is used to organize design knowledge from a decision-based perspective. In our earlier work, we have developed two ontologies for formally representing knowledge related to two primary types of decisions, namely, selection [21] and compromise [22]. These two ontologies enable PDSIDES to capture and document individual decision-related knowledge at a computational level.…”

“…[42] are limited to representing individual (or single) decisions while they fail to represent decision workflows that typically involve multiple decisions interconnected in the design processes. In our earlier work [21,22], we have developed ontologies for representing individual decisions, including selection and compromise decisions, in which the decision-making procedures are computationally modeled with templates and are ready to execute to generate new results in the platform PDSIDES. In this paper, we take a step further to extend the existing selection and compromise ontologies to representing hierarchically decision workflows.…”

“…3. In our earlier work [21,22], we illustrate the use of an ontology for facilitating the reuse, execution, and consistency maintenance of DSP templates. In particular, the reuse of the DSP templates is facilitated with a common vocabulary embodied in the ontology for generating different specific Instances.…”

“…[22]), Classes of the sDSP ontology (represented by "SO," see Ref. [21]), and the two Classes (highlighted in the box) identified in this paper for building DSP hierarchies are listed. The window marked "›" is the Instance editor for the Process Classes, where the Slots are created using the definitions in Sec.…”

A Reusable and Executable Information Model of Experiments on Human Decision Making in Systems Engineering and Design

“…information model) has been proposed for design processes [15] using the compromise Decision Support Problem (cDSP) [16]. A reusable and executable template has been presented [17] using the utility-based selection Decision Support Problem (sDSP) [18]. As an explicit formal specification of terms [19], ontologies are widely employed for knowledge representation.…”