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. Disciplines Industrial Engineering | Programming Languages and Compilers Comments

A semantic information model to improve reuse and communication of engineering design knowledge is presented in this paper. We consider design to be a process involving a sequence of decisions informed by the current state of information. As such, the information model developed is structured to reflect the conceptualizations of engineering design decisions with a particular emphasis on semantically capturing design rationale. Through the approach presented, knowledge reuse is achieved by communicating design rationale. A case study is presented to illustrate two key features of the approach: (1) seamless integration of separate modular domain ontologies and instance knowledge related to engineering design that are needed to support decision making and (2) the explicit documentation of design rationale through design decisions. (2010) Disciplines Databases and Information Systems | Industrial Engineering Comments This article is from Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering 10

This paper presents the foundation for a collaborative Web-based environment for improving communication by formally defining a platform for documentation and sharing of engineering design knowledge throughout the entire design process. In this work an ontological structure is utilized to concisely define a set of individual engineering concepts. This set of modular ontologies link together to create a flexible, yet consistent, product development knowledge-base. The resulting infrastructure uniquely enables the information stored within the knowledge-base to be readily inspectable and computable, thus allowing for design tools that reason on the information to assist designers and automate design processes. A case study of the structural optimization of a transfer plate for an aerospace circuit breaker is presented to demonstrate implementation and usefulness of the knowledge framework. The results indicate that the ontological knowledge-base can be used to prompt engineers to document important product development information, increase understanding of the design process, provide a means to intuitively retrieve information, and seamlessly access distributed information. Keywords Engineering design Disciplines Industrial Engineering | Programming Languages and Compilers CommentsThis proceeding is from ASME ABSTRACTThis paper presents the foundation for a collaborative Webbased environment for improving communication by formally defining a platform for documentation and sharing of engineering design knowledge throughout the entire design process. In this work an ontological structure is utilized to concisely define a set of individual engineering concepts. This set of modular ontologies link together to create a flexible, yet consistent, product development knowledge-base. The resulting infrastructure uniquely enables the information stored within the knowledge-base to be readily inspectable and computable, thus allowing for design tools that reason on the information to assist designers and automate design processes. A case study of the structural optimization of a transfer plate for an aerospace circuit breaker is presented to demonstrate implementation and usefulness of the knowledge framework.The results indicate that the ontological knowledge-base can be used to prompt engineers to document important product development information, increase understanding of the design process, provide a means to intuitively retrieve information, and seamlessly access distributed information.

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