Ontologies in Engineering

Concurrent engineering and model-based design are just two of the methods applied in the modern product development process in the engineering domain. Dr. Tania Tudorache identifies the main challenges of applying these methods to model-based development, focusing on maintaining the consistency among design models that result from parallel development branches. She describes an ontology-based solution to address these challenges. Ontologies are formal descriptions of objects, their properties and relationships in a certain domain. First, she gives a formal definition of consistency among different design models. Second, she describes a methodology for building highly qualitative design models from reusable engineering ontologies. Third, she describes a method for building semantic correspondences among design models that can be used for consistency checking or for propagating the changes from one model to another. And finally, she reports how these methods have been employed in two use cases implemented as part of a research project in an automotive company. This book is addressed to people interested in building and applying engineering ontologies.