PrOntoDecide - Product development ontology supporting the provision of decision-relevant knowledge for multicriteria evaluation of decision alternatives

由于现代产品的日益复杂，产品开发人员面临着新的挑战，他们的中心任务是满足市场需求。这些要求涉及特定的特性，这些特性必须由产品实现，并通过相关的产品特性得到保证。由于产品复杂性的增加，特性和性能之间出现了各种各样的关系，这使得它们的考虑更加困难。产品特性的变化导致整个系统的不同属性，在复杂关系网络的情况下，这将导致难以管理且往往不希望发生的属性变化。其影响包括为适应所需属性而进行的成本密集的迭代，甚至是产品在市场上的失败。因此，必须在开发过程中就确定这些影响，然后在对备选决策进行多标准评估时加以考虑。为此，需要包含这些关系的一致决策模型。在跨学科的产品开发中，这些关系以及相关的信息和数据来源于特定领域的模型，并且可以作为异构数据库使用。这导致了在为多标准决策过程和模型提供决策相关知识方面的挑战。在这些挑战的激励下，所提议的研究项目的目标是在基于需求的、多标准的决策制定领域中，发展关于形式化和提供特定于上下文的知识的基本发现。本体为形式化和提供特定于上下文的知识提供了合适的方法，因此，项目的主要目标必须通过支持决策的产品开发本体（PEO）来实现。在本体开发中，已经考虑了项目第一阶段的自己的初步工作，这为基于所有产品需求的计算机辅助多标准决策提供了必要的基础。通过异构源的数据和知识集成对PEO进行扩展，使产品开发人员能够一致地提供相关的决策知识，并减少手工提供的工作量。验证开发的PEO需要定义合适查询的新方法。总之，该研究项目侧重于关于本体的适用性和可用性的科学发现，以有效地支持多标准决策。

Due to the growing complexity of modern products, new challenges arise for product developers, whose central task is to fulfill the requirements demanded by the market. These requirements concern specific properties, which have to be fulfilled by the product and ensured through related product characteristics. Due to the increase of product complexity, various relations between the characteristics and properties occur, which makes their consideration more difficult. Changes in product characteristics lead to different properties of the whole system, which in the case of complex relation networks result in unmanageable and often undesirable property changes. The effects of this include cost-intensive iterations for the adaptation to the demanded properties or even the failure of products in the market. For this reason, these influences have to be identified already during development and then taken into account during multi-criteria evaluation of decision alternatives. For this purpose, consistent decision models are required that contain these relations. In interdisciplinary product development, these relations as well as the relevant information and data originate from domain-specific models and are available as heterogeneous databases. This results in challenges regarding the provision of decision-relevant knowledge for multi-criteria decision processes and models.Motivated by these challenges, the objective of the proposed research project is to develop fundamental findings about the formalization and provision of context-specific knowledge in the fields of requirements-based, multi-criteria decision making. Ontologies offer a suitable method for the formalization and provision of context-specific knowledge, therefore, the main objective of the project has to be achieved with a decision-supporting product development ontology (PEO). Within the ontology development the own preliminary work from the first phase of the project has be considered, which provides the necessary fundamentals regarding computer aided multi-criteria decision making based on all product requirements. The extension of the PEO through data and knowledge integration from heterogeneous sources enables product developers to provide relevant decision knowledge consistently and reduces the effort for manual provision. Verification of the developed PEO requires new approaches for defining suitable queries. In summary, the research project focuses on scientific findings regarding the applicability and usability of ontologies for an efficient support of multi-criteria decision making.