Research On Ontology-based Functional Modeling Approach And Collaborative Functional Design Environment

Today's industry exhibits a growing trend towards design processes that are more knowledge-intensive, distributed and collaborative. The increasing complexity of engineering systems, coupled with the fact that disparate design knowledge is often scattered around technical domains and lacks consistency, makes effective retrieval, reuse, sharing and exchange of knowledge a critical issue. Functional design and functional modeling provide a new perspective towards the research of the upstream design activity in design process, and its objective is to provide computer tools to link design functions with the structural (physical) embodiments used to realize the functions.Although existing functional modeling frameworks have shown their effectiveness in various standalone functional design applications over the last three decades, the heterogeneity of functional design knowledge representation is still a major obstacle in incorporating functional design methodology in a multi-agent distributed design environment. This paper describes a novel functional modeling approach based on ontology and proposes a collaborative functional design environment named CFDE. The proposed approach applies ontology concept, especially the Web Ontology Language (OWL), for functional design knowledge representation during collaborative functional modeling in engineering design. Based on the approach, a collaborative functional design environment is supposed by us. It includes two visiting levels, i.e., global level and local level. The local level is an ontology-based functional modeling framework, which uses Web Ontology Language (OWL) to build a domain-specific local functional design ontology repository. Using this local ontology repository, the requests coming from the functional design agent can be parsed and performed effectively. The global level is a distributed multi-agent collaborative virtual environment, in which, OWL is used as a content language within the standard FIPA Agent Communication Language (FIPA ACL) messages for describing ontologies, enabling diverse functional design ontologies between different agents to be communicated freely. The proposed architecture facilitates the exchange between diverse knowledge representation schemes in different functional modeling environments, and supports collaborative functional design between multiple functional design agents.