Development of a product configuration system with an ontology-based approach

Product configuration is a crucial means to implement the mass customization paradigm by assembling a set of customizable components to satisfy both customers’ needs and technical constraints. With the aim of enabling efficient and effective development of product configuration systems by reusing configuration knowledge, an ontology-based approach to modeling product configuration knowledge is presented in this paper. The ontology-based product configuration models are hierarchically organized. At the lower level, a configuration meta-model is defined. Based on this meta-model, domain-specific configuration knowledge can be derived by reusing or inheriting the classes or relations in the meta-model. Configuration models are formalized using OWL (Ontology Web Language), an ontology representation language developed by W3C. As a result, configuration models have well-defined semantics due to the logic semantics of OWL, making it possible to automatically detect inconsistencies of configuration knowledge bases. Furthermore, configuration constraints are represented in SWRL, a rule language based on OWL. Finally, actual configuration processes are carried out using JESS, a rule engine for the Java platform, by mapping OWL-based configuration facts and SWRL-based configuration constraints into JESS facts and JESS rules, respectively. The proposed methodology is illustrated with an example for configuring the ranger drilling machine.