Development of a Design Reuse View of Cutting Tool Design Ontology

Knowledge attrition in the cutting tool industry can be mitigated and also the efficiency of the design process can be improved if past design solutions, which are the embodiment of rich expert knowledge, are made easily accessible to the designer for reuse. An effort is underway to realize this desirable situation at Widia Valenite, a company concerned with the design and manufacture of cutting tools. An ontology of cutting tool design exists, however this ontology is too detailed for designers who want quick access to past designs to satisfy new design problems. The potential of this ontology is only realized if a reuse view of the ontology is taken to retrieve design from a database of designs. This work presents the development and validation of the information requirements, in the form of descriptor terms, selected from the ontology for which designers make data entry that allows relevant past designs to be recalled. After these descriptor terms are identified, their success in recalling relevant past designs is demonstrated within a CBR application.