Research On Product Configuration Using Semantic WEB Technology

With the development of science and technology, the competition between products has become more and more fierce, and customers'personality requirement has become more and more critical. Traditional mass production (MP) mode is out of time. Mass customization (MC) is taking the place of MP to become the popular manufacturing mode for modern enterprises. As an important part of MC, product configuration is the key technology and enabling means to realize fast product configuration.In this paper, a review of the development and status of mass customization and product configuration are analyzed in detail. The relevant methods and techniques are summarized. And existing deficient problems are pointed out, which can be mainly concluded as: (1) Having weak expressiveness in configuration knowledge, (2) Performing badly in configuration knowledge sharing, (3) Being lack of reusability of configuration model, (4) Having difficulties in maintaining the configuration knowledge base, etc. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes an ontology-based product configuration meta-model, from which product configuration model for concrete products can be derived. The product configuration knowledge is represented in OWL DL (A sublanguage of Semantic Web ontology language) and SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language). As OWL DL and SWRL is semantically based on predicate logics such that product configuration knowledge can be expressively formalized and efficiently maintained. Meanwhile, OWL and SWRL take RDF/XML as their syntax foundation, so product configuration knowledge is able to be shared and reused in and across enterprises. At the last part of this paper, the Jess rule engine, which is a productive development and delivery expert system tool, is adopted to solve the product configuration problems and the Proto-type system of product configuration is realized.