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

由于现代产品日益复杂，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。这些要求涉及产品必须满足并通过相关产品特性确保的特定性能。由于产品复杂性的增加，特性和性能之间的各种关系出现，这使得它们的考虑更加困难。产品特性的变化会导致整个系统的不同属性，在复杂关系网络的情况下，这会导致难以管理且通常不受欢迎的属性变化。其影响包括为适应所需的性能而进行的成本密集型迭代，甚至是市场上产品的失败。出于这个原因，这些影响已经在开发过程中被确定，然后在决策方案的多标准评估过程中被考虑在内。为此，需要包含这些关系的一致的决策模型。在跨学科产品开发中，这些关系以及相关的信息和数据来自特定领域的模型，并作为异构数据库提供。这导致了关于多标准决策过程和models.Motivated的决策相关的知识的提供的挑战，这些挑战的动机，拟议的研究项目的目标是发展的形式化和提供上下文特定的知识在基于需求的领域的基本调查结果，多标准决策。本体提供了一个合适的方法，形式化和提供特定于上下文的知识，因此，该项目的主要目标是实现与决策支持的产品开发本体（PEO）。在本体论的发展，从项目的第一阶段，已被认为是自己的初步工作，它提供了必要的基础，计算机辅助多标准决策的基础上，所有产品的要求。通过从异构源集成数据和知识来扩展PEO，使产品开发人员能够一致地提供相关的决策知识，并减少手动提供的工作量。验证开发的PEO需要新的方法来定义合适的查询。总之，该研究项目的重点是关于本体的适用性和可用性的科学发现，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.