Spatiotemporal Mereotopology For Designer Systems

The design of new products and their development is a long process, which incepts with a very simple novel concept. Hence, the idea of product development needs to be nurtured properly to successfully develop the product. The use of the virtual platform to represent the conceptual design is popular in today’s world. Traditional product modeler systems are widely used to represent the conceptual products. However, there is a limitation of the traditional designer system of its inability to capture the dynamic nature of the products. The real-world’s product and processes are time dependent. Products have spatial (time-independent) parts and temporal (time-dependent) parts. The traditional designer/modeler systems are usually used to capture the time-independent design processes. This research work aims to bridge this gap in a knowledge base approach. The primary focus of this research work is to understand the behavior of products by developing mathematical formalisms. In that case, RCC8 (Region Connection Calculus with 8 relational entity) and mereotopology are utilized. The spatial behavior is analyzed first and then the temporal behavior is analyzed. After understanding the behavior of products, next aim is to develop the knowledge base to represent the behavior in a structured manner. Ontology is used for that purpose. Two ontology is developed; the OCAD (Ontological CAD) ontology to represent the spatial products nature, and STM (SpatioTemporal Mereotopological) ontology to represent the dynamic nature of the product. After developing the knowledge base a framework is developed to represent the dynamic product behavior in a visualization interface. To reach this goal, the macro data of the designer system is integrated with the .owl data of the ontology firstly. Afterward, the .owl ontology data, which contains the spatiotemporal knowledge is integrated with a visualization interface. X3DOM is used for this purpose since it is widely used in a web platform to visualize spatial and dynamic models. This way the dynamic design intents of the designer is captured. Different dynamic products are tested for various motion cases to check the validity of the framework. This framework is later enhanced by introducing a di-directional CAD to CAD integration. A real-world simplified engine piston is utilized to check the validation. Last, the developed STM knowledge base is also validated in the manufacturing domain for a Resistance Spot Welding’s (RSW) predicted nugget size visualization case