Study on construction and application of product requirement design ontology

Product requirement design is one of the most important links in the product design process. It provides compulsory design consideration and evaluation conceptual criterion for conceptual design. Comprehensive product requirement design is the key of success for a new product in the market. Standardization and modeling of this important but uncertain design link, which is the base of a computer aided product requirement design system, is imperative. Domain ontology, which is an explicit formal specification of shared conceptualization in a domain, is employed in this paper to accomplish this task. By generalizing product requirement classes from both product life-cycle viewpoint and production requirement abstraction process viewpoint, product requirement classification framework is obtained. Based on this framework and ontology construction principle and method, product requirement ontology is developed with ontology modeling language OWL and ontology compile software protégé. At the same time the conversion principle from product requirement classification to product requirement ontology is derived. In the end, by presenting application analysis of product requirement ontology, practicability of ontology technique in product requirement knowledge modeling is proved.