Research On Collaborative Design Based On Ontology And Fuzzy Logic

Collaborative design which possesses features such as multidisciplinary, cross-domain, is a research focus in modern engineering design field. Abundant knowledge will be involved in the collaborative design process, so the description and utilization of knowledge is the key for collaborative design. Firstly, different designers have different comprehension of domain knowledge. If there is a uniform knowledge representation model to provide a semantic basis for the communication among designers, it will disambiguate knowledge comprehension. Secondly, the designers can not work at a higher level if the knowledge is not machine-interpretable. Ontology which has both good knowledge representation ability and reasoning ability supported is a research focus in Artificial Intelligence. We can take advantage of ontology to solve the problems above.This paper presents a collaborative design system architecture based on Ontology; designs the function of system modules; investigates the knowledge representation based on ontology and the applications of ontology in collaborative design. The knowledge base is divided into global shared OWL ontology which provides a semantic basis for the communication among designers so as to make the designers share the common understanding of knowledge and local knowledge base which comprises local OWL ontology and SWRL rule base of the designer's own. A die ontology is constructed by OWL which is the basis of design by reasoning. Then SWRL rule base comprising rules defined based on local ontology is constructed to enhance the reasoning capability of Local knowledge Base. Some structured data can be stored in the Database. Finally, using Jess and protege, etc. complete the software development of die.Local knowledge base was further extended by fuzzy logic based on ontology. The format of fuzzy knowledge represented through OWL and SWRL is converted to the format supported by fuzzy logic inference engine. Designers can work based on fuzzy knowledge which enhances the intelligence of design.Two related instances including the design of die and punch based on ontology and the selection of die based on fuzzy logic was presented in this paper. The feasibility of the collaborative design system architecture and the intelligence of die are verified.