Configuration Knowledge Expression of ETO Product for Mass Customization

Design of Engineering-to-Order (ETO) product is a process describing various constraints with manifold knowledge to meet customer need in mass customization (MC). With the increase of parts´ number and design complexity of ETO product, configuration knowledge including those supporting variant design became more and more. Consequently, reasoning and sharing of knowledge became worse and worse and lead to difficult reasoning and consistency maintenance. Aiming at these problems, a composite method of configuration knowledge expression based on ontology and tabular layouts of article characteristics (TLAC) is proposed. Ontology is used to describe configuration constraint or rules among modules. TLAC is utilized to express the hiberarchy and assemble relations of components in configuration model. This method realizes formalized expression on configuration knowledge of ETO product and facilitates sharing and reuse of domain knowledge. Finally, an example of the rotor of industry turbine was given to verify the effectiveness of the above method.