Ontology-based executable design decision template representation and reuse

In decision-based design, the principal role of a designer is to make decisions. Decision support is crucial to augment this role. In this paper, we present an ontology that provides decision support from both the "construct" and the "information" perspectives that address the gap that existing research focus on these two perspectives separately and cannot provide effective decision support. The decision support construct in the ontology is the compromise decision support problem (cDSP) that is used to make multiobjective design decisions. The information for decision making is archived as cDSP templates and represented using frame-based ontology for facilitating reuse, consistency maintaining, and rapid execution. In order to facilitate designers' effective reuse of the populated cDSP templates ontology instances, we identified three types of modification that can be made when design consideration evolves. In our earlier work, part of the utilization (consistency checking) of the ontology has been demonstrated through a thin-walled pressure vessel redesign example. In this paper, we comprehensively present the ontology utilization including consistency checking, trade-off analysis, and design space visualization based on the pressure vessel example.