A Port Ontology for Conceptual Design of Systems

Abstract

During conceptual design of systems, the emphasis is on generating the system architecture: the configuration of sub-systems and the interactions between them. Ports, as locations of intended interaction, play an important role at this stage of design. They are convenient abstractions for representing the intended exchange of signals, energy or material; they can be applied at different levels of detail, across different energy domains, and to all aspects of design: form, function, and behavior. But to play this versatile role, ports need to be represented in an unambiguous yet flexible fashion, accommodating the differences in vocabulary and approach across different disciplines and perspectives. In this article, we introduce the semantic structure for such an unambiguous representation: a port ontology. The ontology formalizes the conceptualization of ports such that engineers and computer aided design applications can reason about component connections and interactions in system configuration. It defines ports in terms of form, function and behavior attributes and further includes axioms that can be used to support a variety of engineering design tasks, such as port refinement, port compatibility checking, and the instantiation of interaction models. A LEGO example is used to illustrate the ontology and its applications in conceptual design.

Automated synthesis of electromechanical design configurations from empirical analysis of function to form mapping

“…At an abstract level, it also represents the behavior of components by modeling them as "black box" entities that transform certain input flows into certain output flows. In this way, the behavior representation is similar to port based methodologies such as those presented in (Paredis et al, 2001;Liang and Paredis, 2004). As a whole, the CFG captures the conceptual solution of a design problem.…”

Conceptual Design of Compliant Mechanism Based on Port Ontology

“…Methods to be used for matching multi-information, such as functions and constraints, should be further developed. This has been demonstrated by a great lot of work reported in the literatures [3][4][5]. Port compatibilities are used to map and link two components, which makes it possible to build incidence matrix and allow designers from different backgrounds with various interests to access the functional ontology of components [6].…”

“…In a system the relationship of component and its port is described in formula (2) [4,12]: The port attributes of flexible mechanism. the connection between and .…”

Classification of Objects for Conceptual Design:An Ontology Based Approach

“…During the design process, as the designer makes additional decisions about the components and their interactions, these initial placeholders will be gradually transformed into specific port definitions. In terms of the port ontology, the incremental decisions of the designer will result in the addition of attributes to the port definitions, the sub-classing or refinement of attributes, or the addition of constraints on the attribute values [8].…”