An Ontology-based Validation Approach to Resolve Conflicts in the Manufacturing Design Process

In design process of manufacturing, designers analyze the factor of phenomena and apply solutions to phenomena (such as resizing, changing electrical circuits, and modification of mass). There may be often conflicts based on chain relations among solutions which designers cannot recognize. We focus on validating these solutions. In this paper, we propose an ontology for representing chain relations in design process. To validate designers’ solutions, we propose an algorithm to detect conflicts between a given solution and those for other design cases. In our case study, we introduce our approach to product development and demonstrate the efficacy and practicability of our proposed ontology.