Application of ontological thought in collaborative product R & D orientied to automobile lifecycle

As collaborative product development expands deeply and broadly in automobile field, product knowledge involved in collaboration becomes more and more complex. In order to effectively organize and manage knowledge oriented to automobile lifecycle and to support their sharing and mining, ontological thought is introduced to achieve the collaborating R&D platform oriented to automobile lifecycle. Firstly, the formalized definition of automobile domain ontology is proposed, i.e. conceptions, relations, attributions, regulations and cases, and the domain ontology base is constructed. Secondly, automobile domain ontology is described and expressed by BNF formulations, and is stored respectively in the product ontology base, the ontology base of manufacturing technology and the ontology base of enterprise business. Finally, an ontology-based product collaborative R&D system oriented to automobile lifecycle is established. This system provides an effective platform for automobile domain knowledge retrieval, reuse and sharing.