A Framework for Ontology-Based Heterogeneous Data Integration for Cost Management in Product Family Design

Abstract

High quality, high impact and economical products and systems are important goals for an enterprise. The usage of product families can be strategic to achieving these goals, yet defining these families can be challenging, requiring the consideration of numerous cost factors. This requires bringing together a great number of heterogeneous data sources of varying formats in a manner that allows the product development team to easily locate and reuse information in a collaborative manner across time and space. To date, our work has focused on the development and use of an Activity-Based Cost ontology (ABC ontology) to guide designers drill down to get at information for product family design. However, this ontology is built in such a way that it can only support information retrieval from the ontology and does not bring together and connect heterogeneous data resources. It does not address the problem of designers who struggle with obtaining relevant details from different departments in an enterprise. While there have been several semantic data schema integration tools for heterogeneous data resources integration, these tools cannot guide users to related information, that would lead to the root cause of the high cost. In this paper, in order to better manage cost in product family design, an ontology-based framework is put forward that builds on our prior work and combines the advantages of ABC ontology and data schema integration tools. The ontology-based framework can guide users to the proper information aspects through querying the central ontology, and give users detailed information about these aspects from heterogeneous data resources with the support of local ontologies. Ultimately, this framework will facilitate designers with better utilization of cost-related factors for product family design from a whole enterprise perspective.