Constraint capture and maintenance in engineering design
Constraint capture and maintenance in engineering design
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DOI：
10.1017/s089006040800022x
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发表时间：
2008-09
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Suraj Ajit;D. Sleeman;David W. Fowler;D. Knott
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文献类型：
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作者：
Suraj Ajit;D. Sleeman;David W. Fowler;D. Knott
设计师评审是由先进知识技术联盟开发的一个系统，用于支持大型组织（如劳斯莱斯）的设计师，以确保设计符合特定设计的规范以及公司的设计规则手册。在这里讨论的主要应用程序中，使用喷气发动机本体描述了不断发展的设计。设计规则表示为领域本体的约束。目前，为了捕获约束信息，领域专家（设计工程师）必须与知识工程师合作以识别约束，然后知识工程师的任务是将这些编码到机器人的知识库中。这是一项容易出错且耗时的任务。这是非常可取的，以减轻知识工程师的这项任务，所以我们已经开发了一个系统，ConEditor+，使领域专家自己捕捉和维护这些约束。此外，我们假设，要适当地应用，维护和重用约束，有必要了解每个约束适用的基本假设和上下文。我们称之为“应用条件”，这些条件构成了与约束相关的基本原理的一部分。我们提出了一种方法来捕获与约束相关联的应用条件，并证明了一个明确的表示（机器可解释的格式）的应用条件（理由）连同相应的约束和领域本体可以使用的机器来支持维护的约束。对约束维护的支持包括检测不一致、包容、冗余、约束之间的融合以及建议适当的改进。建议的方法提供了直接的好处，设计师，因此，应该鼓励他们输入的应用条件（理由）。
Abstract The Designers' Workbench is a system developed by the Advanced Knowledge Technologies Consortium to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, to ensure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company's design rule book(s). In the principal application discussed here, the evolving design is described using a jet engine ontology. Design rules are expressed as constraints over the domain ontology. Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench's knowledge base. This is an error-prone and time-consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, so we have developed a system, ConEditor+, that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. Further, we hypothesize that to appropriately apply, maintain, and reuse constraints, it is necessary to understand the underlying assumptions and context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to them as “application conditions,” and these form a part of the rationale associated with the constraint. We propose a methodology to capture the application conditions associated with a constraint and demonstrate that an explicit representation (machine interpretable format) of application conditions (rationales) together with the corresponding constraints and the domain ontology can be used by a machine to support maintenance of constraints. Support for the maintenance of constraints includes detecting inconsistencies, subsumption, redundancy, fusion between constraints, and suggesting appropriate refinements. The proposed methodology provides immediate benefits to the designers, and hence, should encourage them to input the application conditions (rationales).