Constraint capture and maintenance in engineering design

摘要: The Designers' Workbench is a system developed by the Advanced Knowledge Technologies Consortium to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, ensure that design consistent with specification for particular well company's rule book(s). In principal application discussed here, evolving described using jet engine ontology. Design rules are expressed constraints over domain Currently, capture constraint information, expert (design engineer) has work knowledge engineer identify constraints, and it then task of encode these into Workbench's base. This an error-prone time-consuming task. It highly desirable relieve this task, so we have system, ConEditor+, enables experts themselves maintain constraints. Further, hypothesize appropriately apply, maintain, reuse necessary understand underlying assumptions context which each applicable. We refer them “application conditions,” form part rationale associated constraint. propose methodology conditions demonstrate explicit representation (machine interpretable format) (rationales) together corresponding ontology can be used machine maintenance Support includes detecting inconsistencies, subsumption, redundancy, fusion between suggesting appropriate refinements. proposed provides immediate benefits designers, hence, should encourage input (rationales).