Integration of design intent during the product lifecycle management

There has been significant achievement in integrating product data during the whole lifecycle phases with shared common ontologies while taking advantage of intelligent retrieval mechanisms. In order to support integrated decision making on product redesign or maintenance operations, we should solve a challenging issue: ‘how the product lifecycle management (PLM) stores and retrieves the know-how and the knowledge of an organization concerning manufactured products’. This paper describes the extension of a previously developed PLM Semantic Ontology Model toward integration with design intent. The proposed approach uses OWL2 to represent product lifecycle data and design knowledge. The approach was applied to the redesign of a car door part for laser welding. Our work demonstrates how to retrieve design intent as a specific type of knowledge data in the context of design decisions. Such an approach can ultimately contribute to reducing design time, making knowledge transfer clear and thus improving the quality of designed products.