Research On Product Configuration Model Based On Ontology

The purpose of Mass Customization is to provide the customized product or service with high efficiency and low cost of mass production. As the key technology of Mass-Customization production, product configuration is the premise and basis of the fast quoted price, the fast design, the fast manufacture and the fast assembly for Mass-Customization enterprises. The target of ontology is to capture the domain knowledge, provide the comprehension of domain knowledge, and ensure the acknowledgeable vocabulary of the domain and explicitly define vocabularies and relationship between these vocabularies by formal model in different gradation. Product configurative model based on ontology has unified patulous concept set of configuration knowledge, it also has superior representative ability, so it is favorable for sharing and reusing of configuration knowledge, and also maintain of configuration model.In this paper, the theory of product configuration is summarized. A best product configuration model is concluded from the analysis of existing product configuration modeling. It needs to be separated knowledge representation from solution of the product configuration.The Web technology is combined with ontology which is characteristic of sharing in this paper. The knowledge of product configuration is generalized in a new general ontology model of product configuration to solve the problem of its representation. The taxonomy and constraints are included in this model, and also every concept and their relation are defined. The paper expresses the concepts and their relation of the domain product configuration model of computer in OWL.SWRL is used for representing specific constraint rules,and than check the consistency of the model.Finally, knowledge representation based on ontology is combined with the solution based on CSP in this paper. The rules of conversion between two models are established. The domain product configuration model of computer is solved by the back-track algorithm based on the constraint satisfaction problem. This algorithms procedure is using MATLAB language. The results show that the methods of knowledge representation and solution of product configuration can be used for configuration.