Hybrid Knowledge Representation and Reasoning With Ontology and Rules for Product Engineering

This paper proposes a framework for building product information model (PIM) and product rule model (PRM), and integrated reasoning based on Description Frame Logic (DFL) [1] for collaborative product engineering environments. Most of the previous research has focused either on building ontology for PIM or on building a rule base for PRM respectively, not on both of them. Some research on product engineering has tried to build both ontology language and rule-language. But, the research is/has been limited to using both languages in a homogeneous approach under open world assumption (OWA) such as Web Ontology Language (OWL)/Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL), which has some drawbacks to accommodate the requirements of enhanced expressivity for collaborative product engineering. We adopt Description Frame Logic (DFL) framework to integrate product semantics in PIM and engineering-specific knowledge in PRM based on description logic (DL) and logic programming (LP) under both open world assumption (OWA) and closed world assumption (CWA). This enables to secure seamless and interactive reasoning between PIM and PRM. We also include rule-expressions and constraint checking with DL for PIM while we include DL-expression in rules and LP’s non-logical features for PRM. This provides enhancement of expressiveness required for product engineering. Additionally, we show the benefits of the proposed framework with a case study.