Model and Knowledge Representation for the Reuse of Design Process Knowledge Supporting Design Automation in Mass Customization

Abstract

Mass customization aims to meet individual requirements and, therefore, is one way to attract and retain customers—a key challenge in the design industry. The increase in design automation has offered new opportunities to design customized products at high speed in a way that is cost equivalent to mass production. Design automation is built upon the reuse of product and process knowledge. Ontologies have proven to be a feasible, highly aggregated knowledge representation in engineering design. While product and process knowledge from other lifecycle phases are represented in multiple approaches, the design process of the product as well as the adaption process of product variants is missing, causing breakpoints or additional iterations in design automation. Therefore, suitable knowledge representation tailored to design automation is still missing. Accordingly, this contribution proposes a novel knowledge representation approach to enable design automation for mass customization. Methodically, this novel approach uses semantic enrichment of CAD environments to automatically deduce information about a design task, design rationale, and design process represented by a formal ontology. The integration of the design process significantly differentiates the approach from previous ones. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by a bike crank customization process.

Automated Knowledge‐Based Design for Additive Manufacturing: A Case Study with Flow Manifolds

“…A KBE approach aims to capture the design knowledge required in a specific application and implement recurring tasks as automated, reusable algorithms 47–50, 54, 55. Prior works describe various frameworks that can be used to conceptualize, implement, and operate KBE systems.…”

“…The design of parts can be automated using different methods such as feature databases, CAD templates, topology optimization, and shape grammars [42][43][44][45][46]. This work focuses on automated design tools that follow a knowledgebased engineering (KBE) approach [47][48][49][50]. The basic idea of a KBE approach is to capture the design knowledge and activities required in a specific application and implement recurring design activities as automated and reusable design algorithms.…”

Knowledge Documentation Based on Automatic Identification and Clustering of Change Intentions in CAD Data of Wiring Harnesses

“…In this case, the commands executed by the user are recorded and documented in an XML file. As an alternative, design process knowledge can be recorded by comparison of the input state with the output state based on the same structure (Dworschak et al, 2021). Depending on the use case and chosen format of the knowledge representation, customized comparison methods have to be used.…”

“…A major barrier in capturing the design intent is that these approaches require additional effort on behalf of the creator, who may refuse to invest additional time (Szykman et al, 2001). Moreover, it should not be underestimated that the additional effort reduces the overall efficiency of the KBE process, which significantly influences the acceptance and success of a KBE application (Lundin et al, 2017;Dworschak et al, 2021).…”

Study on an architecture of ontology-based task modeling and deduction for automotive troubleshooting service

“…25 OntoSTEP is addressed to transform the geometric data of product with STEP format into ontology. [26][27][28] ONTO-PDM, a productoriented ontology, is generated for interoperability of product information management during the manufacturing settings. 29 An ontology-based architecture is depicted to represent the knowledge with functional structure in product design stage.…”