4. Ontology Development and Optimization for Data Integration and Decision-Making in Product Design and Obsolescence Management

Product development in today’s global marketplace faces many challenges and pressures. Reducing development time, increasing quality and value, and reducing cost implications throughout the life cycle are critical. Strategies for dealing with rapidly changing technologies are very real and significant issues for product development as well. For low volume long-life complex products and systems in particular, such as those utilized by military and avionics applications, rapid advances in technologies have led to an escalation of time and costs challenges as manufacturers scramble to keep up with changes brought on by the obsolescence of components embodied in such systems. While some computer-based tools have been developed to aid product design and the management of obsolescence, benefits have been limited by issues associated with integrating heterogeneous sources of distributed information and knowledge. Data conflicts, data inexplicitness, incompleteness, inconsistency, and lacking information and knowledge needs for decisions associated with the management of obsolescence and product design continue. In recent years, ontology-based methods have presented new and promising approaches to manage knowledge in engineering, integrate multiple data resources, and facilitate the consideration of complex relations among concepts and properties for decision-making. In this chapter, manual and automatic ontology development and maintenance are introduced and ontologies can be optimized through identifying potential relations among distributed ontologies. Details of an ontology-based information system for data integration and decision support are also explained. Case studies are provided to illustrate the utilization of ontology with the proposed approaches to realize efficient product design and obsolescence management.