Decision support oriented ontological modeling of product knowledge

Despite the rapid development of computer science and information technology, a knowledge-based decision support system for new product development is still not fully accomplished due to the growing knowledge complexity, inconsistent terminology and a lack of widely accessibly knowledge repositories. To address these issues, this paper analyzes the characteristics of product knowledge in manufacturing enterprises and presents a decision support oriented ontological modeling approach for product knowledge. The paper first introduces a framework of knowledge-based decision support for new product development. Then OWL ontology is used to appropriately capture and organize the knowledge generated at various stages of product lifecycle. Finally, we integrate the ontology with rule systems to construct a decision support platform for facilitating knowledge-driven decision making in new product development, and a case of knowledge-based decision support is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.