An information and knowledge framework to support multiple viewpoints in the design for manufacture of injection moulded products

Integration of product life cycle activities in design and manufacture has been pursued and advanced for over 20 years. A commonly accepted computational approach to integrating product design and manufacture software is to define a neutral representation of product related information for the software applications and capture them in product models. Product models provide a source and repository for all product related information during the product development activities. However, in a team-based environment, the information of product representation needs to be viewed from multiple perspectives. This is because each team member is likely to be interested in different aspects of the information. This leads to the need for multiple viewpoint information representations of the product to be integrated with each other to support product development activities. While much work has been done into the concept of product modelling, there is a need to extend this approach to support information integration between multiple viewpoint product representations by defining techniques to capture the knowledge of relationships of such multiple viewpoint information representations. The research reported in this thesis identifies a novel method for integrating multiple viewpoint representations of products. An ontology is defined with two separate but related layers to capture multiple viewpoint product representations and the knowledge of relationships between such multiple viewpoints separately. This ontology contains: product model as information layer; knowledge layer to capture integration knowledge; and knowledge links to facilitate the communication of both layers. The work uses injection moulded product design and manufacture as an example to explore and demonstrate the research idea. An experimental two-layered ontology has been implemented using an object-oriented database and Visual c++ programming language. Experiments have been performed to demonstrate how the two-layered ontology can support the integration of multiple viewpoint information. This research contributes to the understanding of the definition of information and knowledge models and methods of integration to support multiple viewpoint information of products.