Ontology and CBR based automated decision-making method for the disassembly of mechanical products

•Combining CBR with ontology makes the proposed method has a general applicability.•Ontology enables the automation of the CBR/RBR based decision-making process.•Ontology realises the integration, reusing, and sharing of disassembly knowledge.•Ontology based RBR complements the deficiency of CBR when lack of applicative cases.•The proposed method has been implemented by a program and verified by a case study.

This paper proposes an ontology and CBR (case-based reasoning) based method which overcomes the difficulty for computers to understand complex structures of various mechanical products and makes the disassembly decision-making process of the products fully automated and cost-saving. In this method, (1) ontology concept is applied to the disassembly decision-making. This enables computers to understand and self-reason the CBR/RBR (rule-based reasoning) based disassembly decision-making process. Since ontology uniforms different kinds of disassembly-related knowledge from different sources, the integration and sharing of the knowledge could be achieved; (2) high flexible decision-making to various conditions with high quality is achieved by the combination of ontology and CBR; (3) to achieve the decision-making when CBR fails, an ontology based RBR method is designed to complement the shortage of CBR in the disassembly decision-making field. The paper also presents an application program to realise the proposed method. In addition, a case study is analysed to verify the validity and automation of the program.