An ontology-based support for knowledge modeling and Decision-Making in Collaborative Product Design

In order to reduce product costs and time-to-market while improving product quality, industrial companies are forced to adopt an effective collaborative product development approach. Greater efficiency can be achieved if this collaboration is realized at the earlier phases of the product lifecycle, particularly, at the design phase. Yet, to achieve such an agile and flexible approach, two major issues need to be solved. First, the exchange and management of product, process and logistic information among many actors (and then semantic interoperability between the different information systems involved) and second, the reactivity of the decision making process. With the emergence of ontologies as a new modeling paradigm in industry during the last decades, efficient integration and semantic interoperability among all the involved inter-actors of the virtual enterprise have become attainable. In fact, in addition to their great expressiveness, ontologies can afford many reasoning capabilities. Therefore, our aim in this paper is to exploit the different potentialities of ontologies in order to support the collaborative product design process. First, we will exploit their expressivity to support the design information and knowledge management and second we will exploit their inference abilities to support the decisionmaking process within the design phase. To do so, we propose a new collaborative design domain ontology, general enough to model simultaneously the product, process and logistic data and specific enough to support the decision making process. Then, in a second part, we extend our proposed ontology into a fuzzy ontological model and exploit its potentialities through the proposition of a new fuzzy-ontology based approach to handle the vagueness and subjectivity inherent to the different stages of the design phase and to support the decision making process at this phase An industrial case of study is given to validate and demonstrate the competency of the proposed ontology (CPD-Onto) and our proposed fuzzy ontology-based approach.