An Ontology for Representation of Fixture Design Knowledge

AbstractAs design and manufacturing practices are increasingly becoming global and distributed, collaborative design by dispersed machine agents is garnering more attention as an appropriate framework for product development. One of the major challenges in deployment of agent-based systems in distributed environments is provision of a common language which connects the heterogeneous actors both syntactically and semantically. Focusing on fixture design process, this paper introduces a formal ontology, called FIXON, for representation of domain knowledge. The proposed ontology uses Description Logic (DL) as the knowledge representation formalism, thus enabling automated reasoning and inference by machine agents. To demonstrate how the proposed ontology supports seamless information exchange among machine agents, four application areas, namely, problem formulation, design representation, design retrieval and design validation are discussed.

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