Model and Knowledge Representation for the Reuse of Design Process Knowledge Supporting Design Automation in Mass Customization

Mass customization aims to meet individual requirements and, therefore, is one way to attract and retain customers—a key challenge in the design industry. The increase in design automation has offered new opportunities to design customized products at high speed in a way that is cost equivalent to mass production. Design automation is built upon the reuse of product and process knowledge. Ontologies have proven to be a feasible, highly aggregated knowledge representation in engineering design. While product and process knowledge from other lifecycle phases are represented in multiple approaches, the design process of the product as well as the adaption process of product variants is missing, causing breakpoints or additional iterations in design automation. Therefore, suitable knowledge representation tailored to design automation is still missing. Accordingly, this contribution proposes a novel knowledge representation approach to enable design automation for mass customization. Methodically, this novel approach uses semantic enrichment of CAD environments to automatically deduce information about a design task, design rationale, and design process represented by a formal ontology. The integration of the design process significantly differentiates the approach from previous ones. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by a bike crank customization process