Case representation and retrieval for complex product design based on case-based reasoning

Abstract

Reusing design knowledge of products is a useful way to solve the efficiency issue of complex product design. The design knowledge is tacit, empirical, and unstructured and there exists insufficient case matching and inefficient design reuse in complex products design process. Aiming at these problems, this paper presents an improved case-based reasoning methodology combining ontology with two-stage retrieval. Firstly, a knowledge domain ontology model of complex product design is constructed, and the technology of ontology-based data access is introduced to automatically generate a case knowledge base with semantic information. Then, a new two-stage case retrieval method integrated semantic query with similarity calculation is proposed. The case subset is selected by query statements. It has the characteristic of isomorphism with design problem. The retrieval mechanism is applied to compress the traversal space, reduce the redundancy of semantic similarity calculation, improve the retrieval efficiency, and fulfill the target of case reuse. Finally, a variant design of the chiller unit as an example is executed to illustrate the use of the proposed method, and experiments are organized to evaluate its performance. The result shows that the proposed approach has an average precision of 92% and high stability, outperforming existing methods.