Ontological Support for Consistency Checking of Engineering Design Workflows

In this paper we describe a novel approach for engineering process representation based on the application of formal ontologies. We illustrate components of a framework that comprises domain abstractions, design interfaces and meta-data in the engineering design domain in the form of process-, artefactand task ontologies. A concrete application and use case of the framework components is detailed in order to demonstrate the capabilities for representation of design processes on a high level of abstraction. The realm of Planning is employed to showcase workflow decomposition. We show, how the framework can be applied to perform workflow consistency checking and point out some scenarios where the developed framework can provide support in the task of engineering design analysis and improvement.