The primary objective of this proposal is to conceptualize, design, develop and demonstrate an approach using semantics to integrate engineering applications for design evaluations in a manner that can adapt to changing situations and needs. We classify opportunities for adaptive design evaluations into three categories: viewpoint adaptivity, composition adaptivity, and deployment adaptivity. Unfortunately, most ensembles of engineering software tools for design evaluations are not adaptive; furthermore there are few general frameworks and approaches for enabling this adaptivity. Unlike existing approaches that use unified data model to represent the data through out the entire product lifecycle, our approach is to build a distributed ontology-based knowledge system in an integration framework. This is based on building concepts into ontologies for each domain and interfacing actual data and ontologies, so that users working in different areas can use concepts and terminologies within his/her own expertise to describe the design semantics. In parallel, the approach will include support for composition adaptivity for evaluations that require different ensembles of applications and deployment strategies. Thus, all three important adaptivity opportunities will be addressed in a unified manner. Our approach, coined OADE (Ontology-based Adaptive Design Evaluation), will have as components representation tools, ontology builders, ontology projecting tools, custom tools, and communication tools. A prototype implementation will be created using technologies such as OWL (representation tool), Jena (ontology builder), Protege (ontology editor), JAVA, JDK, .NET ( communication tools) to demonstrate the approach for a sample scenario consisting of a virtual assembly system and a CAD system.
The overall benefits to society from this project include a viable method to integrate some of the most promising design tools in a disciplined and synergistic manner to get great improvements in productivity and reduction of waste due to untenable designs, and the creation of a competent workforce capable of adopting state-of-the-art technologies.
