Semantic Web Solutions in the Automotive Industry

Abstract

This chapter describes how we employed ontologies to solve and optimize different design tasks at an automotive company. We first introduce five core engineering ontologies that provides the formal grounding for the described use cases. We used these ontology to represent engineering systems , and to perform change propagation and consistency checking of the design models. The first use case presents an approach that helps engineers derive an optimized design starting from a system specification, whose parameters are refined in iterative design steps. This use case will demonstrate how we represented requirements and their iterative refinements using ontologies, and how we used a constraint solver in conjunction with an ontology to derive an optimized design with respect to different criteria. The second use case comes from the collaborative development process of an automatic gearbox , in which distributed engineering teams developed different models (i.e., geometric and functional) of the same product in a parallel way. We used ontologies to represent the different models of the same engineering product, and used formal mappings to define the correspondences between the different models. We could then use reasoning to check the consistency of the two models with each other, and to propagate changes from one model to the other.