A Knowledge-Based Method for Innovative Design for Additive Manufacturing Supported by Modular Ontologies

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) offers significant opportunities for product innovation in many fields provided that designers are able to recognize the potential values of AM in a given product development process. However, this may be challenging for design teams without substantial experience with the technology. Design inspiration based on past successful applications of AM may facilitate application of AM even in relatively inexperienced teams. While designs for additive manufacturing (DFAM) methods have experimented with reuse of past knowledge, they may not be sufficient to fully realize AM's innovative potential. In many instances, relevant knowledge may be hard to find, lack context, or simply unavailable. This design information is also typically divorced from the underlying logic of a products' business case. In this paper, we present a knowledge based method for AM design ideation as well as the development of a suite of modular, highly formal ontologies to capture information about innovative uses of AM. This underlying information model, the innovative capabilities of additive manufacturing (ICAM) ontology, aims to facilitate innovative use of AM by connecting a repository of a business and technical knowledge relating to past AM products with a collection of knowledge bases detailing the capabilities of various AM processes and machines. Two case studies are used to explore how this linked knowledge can be queried in the context of a new design problem to identify highly relevant examples of existing products that leveraged AM capabilities to solve similar design problems.

Interoperability of disparate engineering domain ontologies using basic formal ontology

“…These include the creation of an ontology of additive manufacturing processes (Eddy et al 2015) and a design for additive manufacturing ontology (Dinar and Rosen 2017). More recently a modular multidomain ontology was used to link process and machine capability information to a repository of AM designs, which was then used to construct a set of sample queries to aid in design (Hagedorn, Krishnamurty, and Grosse 2018). While we believe that these represent significant contributions in ontology development for additive manufacturing, it is notable that neither of these resources incorporated robust methods for incorporating into the design process knowledge from the product domain, for example knowledge about properties of materials or about product use environments.…”

“…Other domain ontologies were also used to describe the knowledge domains covered by IFAMP. As the creation of a design repository to aid in design ideation is central to its envisioned use, IFAMP draws upon the Innovative Capabilities of Additive Manufacturing (ICAM) ontology (Hagedorn, Krishnamurty, and Grosse 2018), which implements ontology-linked knowledge bases focusing on innovative product design. The ICAM ontology provides content representing the manufacturing, value, and innovation domains in our new framework.…”

Cascading Forgetting in Product Development Challenges and Evaluation

“…With focus on manufacturing another semantic approach for knowledge reuse is given by Camarillo et al (2018), which supports process Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) by an ontology. Within additive manufacturing Hagedorn et al (2018) present a method for innovative design. The approach works with an ontology, which captures business and technical knowledge about the innovative use of additive manufacturing.…”

A product life cycle ontology for additive manufacturing

“…Roh[29] develops an ontology for AM to represent information for different process models for laser, thermal, micro structure, and mechanical properties for metal-based AM of Ti-6-6Al-4V. Liang[30] develops the AM-OntoProc ontology that promote the modeling and reutilization of knowledge towards the AM process planning where AM process is supposed to begin from the utilization of CAD software during the design stage until the final AM prototype is developed.Finally, there is recent work by Hagedorn et al[31], which uses BFO asthe platform for an AM ontology called Innovative Capabilities of Additive Manufacturing (ICAM). ICAM also reuses the BFO-conformant ontology -the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) -to provide the higher-level representation of information-related types that serves as its backbone.…”

“…However, despite of the selection of BFO due to the CHAMP project requirement, BFO's well-documented guidelines and training material, it's extensive use in in hundredsof projects in biomedical and military domains, and increasingly being adopted in industry as a top-level framework are another factors that contribute to the selection of BFO. ICAM[31], CCO[37] and Functional Graded Material Ontology…”