Product design reuse with parts libraries and an engineering semantic web for small- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises

The design reuse of products is vital for mass customization. In small- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMMEs), employing design reuse is a challenging issue because of the limited level and scale of these enterprises. Previous studies have not considered this issue and have attempted to rebuild a complete novel system. In this study, we propose a design reuse approach based on an engineering semantic web (ESW) and implement a design reuse system. This system does not rebuild the current parts library in SMMEs. In our approach, we construct an ESW and a mapping relation to introduce engineering semantic information into the existing parts library. In addition, we employ ant colony optimization (ACO) for the retrieval of design information. A design reuse prototype system is implemented for solving the problem of design reuse in SMMEs.