A CBR system for injection mould design based on ontology: A case study

Case-based reasoning (CBR) often shows significant promise for improving the effectiveness of design support in mould design, which is a domain strong in practice but poor in theory. However, existing CBR systems lack semantic understanding, which is important for intelligent knowledge retrieval in design support system. This hinders the application of CBR in injection mould design. In order to develop an intelligent CBR system and meet the need of design support for injection mould design, this paper integrates ontology technology into a CBR system by constructing domain ontology as case-base with a new method, in which two means of acquisition are combined, one is acquiring ontology from existing ontologies, the other from established engineering knowledge resources, and proposing a new semantic retrieval method as the first grade case retrieval. Numerical measurement is also employed as the second grade case retrieval, which adopts various methods to calculate different types of attribute values. A case is executed to illustrate the use of proposed CBR system, then a lot of experiments are organized to evaluate its performance and the result shows that the proposed approach outperforms existing CBR systems.

► Construct domain ontology by adopting two means of acquisition. ► Propose a new semantic retrieval method as the first grade case retrieval. ► Adopt numerical measurement as the second case retrieval. ► Execute experiment to validate the proposed CBR system.