Product Variety Modeling Based on Formal Concept Analysis

Increasing product variety based on product family and product platform provides a company with a competitive advantage over its competitors. As products become more complex, short-life cycled and customized, the design efforts require more knowledge-intensive, collaborative and coordinating efforts for information sharing. By sharing knowledge, information, component and process across different families of products, the product realization process will be more efficient, cost-effective and quick-responsive. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is used for analyzing data and forming semantic structures that are formal abstractions of concepts of human thoughts. A Web Ontology Language (OWL) is designed for applications that need to process the content of information instead of simply presenting information to humans. OWL also captures the evolution of different components of the product family. The purpose of this paper is to develop product variety modeling to increase the usefulness of common platform. In constructing and analyzing product ontology, FCA is adopted for conceptual knowledge processing. For the selected product family, product variety Ontology is constructed and implemented using protege-2000.