A view-based approach to modeling product semantics in design chains

To reduce “time-to-market”, semantics of a product must be synchronized in a design chain, because inconsistencies during collaborative product development cause an unnecessary waste of time. To guarantee semantic synchronization, all enterprises should co-operate and maintain semantics whenever they are updated. In this paper, a V2-model is proposed to share product semantics during collaborative product development through view-based semantic synchronization. The V2-model has two kinds of model layers for semantic synchronization: a view-independent model (VIM) layer and a view-specific model (VSM) layer. Semantics in the VIM is the well-structured semantics shared among all enterprises and thus are published across the collaborative design chain. On the other hand, semantics in the VSM is the inconsistent semantics for product information that occurs during the early design stage, when different enterprises may have differing views about product concepts that are constructs of semantics. The inconsistencies between the different views can be solved by a decision and sharing (DnS) process and V2-model. The DnS process transforms the concepts in the VSM to the concepts in the VIM by utilizing topic maps-based scoping and merging functions. The proposed V2-model has been successfully applied to the design process of a washing machine model.