Towards the Integration of Ontologies and SA–Nets to Manage Design and Engineering Core Knowledge

This paper presents a conceptual framework for the development of Knowledge Management (KM) systems to support experts in complex design activities. Designing a complex object is not a simple task, since it is concerned not only with problem solving issues, but also with the growing needs for capturing and managing the core knowledge involved in it. A complex object is typically made of a huge number of parts that are put together according to a first set of constraints (i.e. the procedural knowledge), dependable on the functional properties it must satisfy, and a second set of rules, dependable on what the expert thinks abut the problem and how he/she would represent it (i.e. the declarative knowledge). The paper illustrates a way to unify both types of knowledge, exploiting the SA-Nets formalism to capture the procedural knowledge and a mereological approach to represent declarative knowledge.