An Ontology for Reusable and Executable Decision Templates

Abstract

Engineering design is increasingly recognized as a decision making process. Providing decision support is crucial to augment designers' decision-making capability in this process. In this paper, we present a template-based ontological method that integrates the decision-making mechanism with problem-specific information; thus, it can provide design decision support from both the “construct” and the “information” perspectives. The “construct,” namely, decision-making mechanism, is the utility-based Decision Support Problem (u-sDSP), which is a rigorous mathematical model that facilitates designers making multi-attribute selection decisions under uncertainty, while the information for decision making is archived as u-sDSP templates and represented using frame-based ontology to facilitate reuse, execution, and consistency-maintaining. This paper is an extension of our earlier work on the ontological modeling of the compromise decisions. The unique advantage of this ontology is that it captures both the declarative and procedural knowledge of selection decisions and represents them separately, thus facilitating designers reusing, executing previous documented decision knowledge to effect new decisions. The efficacy of ontology is demonstrated using a rapid prototyping (RP) resource selection example.