Semantic Web Solutions in the Automotive Industry

This chapter describes how we employed ontologies to solve and optimize different design tasks at an automotive company. We first introduce five core engineering ontologiesEngineering ontology that provides the formal grounding for the described use cases. We used these ontology to represent engineering systemsEngineeringengineering system, and to perform change propagationKnowledge change managementchange propagation and consistency checkingConsistency checking of the design models. The first use case presents an approach that helps engineers derive an optimized design starting from a system specification, whose parameters are refined in iterative design steps. This use case will demonstrate how we represented requirementsRequirements and their iterative refinements using ontologies, and how we used a constraint solverConstraint solver in conjunction with an ontology to derive an optimized design with respect to different criteria. The second use case comes from the collaborative development processCollaborative development process of an automatic gearboxAutomatic gearbox, in which distributedDistributed engineering teams developed different models (i.e., geometric and functional) of the same product in a parallel way. We used ontologies to represent the different models of the same engineering product, and used formal mappingsFormal mapping to define the correspondences between the different models. We could then use reasoningReasoning to check the consistency of the two models with each other, and to propagate changesKnowledge change managementchange propagation from one model to the other.