Jyotirmaya Nanda

A Methodology for Product Family Ontology Development using Formal Concept Analysis and Web Ontology Language

The use of ontologies for information sharing is well documented in the literature, but the lack of a comprehensive and systematic methodology for constructing product ontologies has limited the process of developing ontologies for design artifacts. In this paper we introduce the Product Family Ontology Development Methodology (PFODM), a novel methodology to develop formal product ontologies using the Semantic Web paradigm. Within PFODM, Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is used first to identify similarities among a finite set of design artifacts based on their properties and then to develop and refine a product family ontology using Web Ontology Language (OWL). A family of seven one-time-use cameras is used to demonstrate the steps of the PFODM to construct such an ontology. The benefit of PFODM lies in providing a systematic and consistent methodology for constructing ontologies to support product family design. The resulting ontologies provide a hierarchical conceptual clustering of related design artifacts, which is particularly advantageous for product family design where parts, processes, and most important, information is intentionally shared and reused to reduce complexity, lead-time, and development costs. Potential uses of the resulting ontologies and FCA representations within product family design are also discussed.

Development of a Framework for Web-Based Product Platform Customization

Product customization is a value-added activity that can significantly increase sales by increasing customer satisfaction. Many companies are using product platforms to increase product variety and customization while reducing development costs and time-tomarket. While flooding the market with a variety of products may satisfy some customers by providing a substitute for customization, variety is not customization. This subtle, yet important, distinction between variety and customization motivates the need for investigating technologies to facilitate customer involvement during the product realization process, and our focus in this paper is on web-based platform customization strategies enabled by recent advances in information technology. Towards that end, we describe the development of an interactive web-based platform customization framework as an extension of product family design and present a prototype that has been created as part of on-going research with a company that produces customized refiner plates for pulp and paper processing. While the utility of the proposed web-based framework is demonstrated in the context of customizing a refiner plate design, the proposed framework is applicable to a variety of engineered products and enhances customer interaction during the product realization process while reducing design and manufacturing lead-time for custom orders. @DOI: 10.1115/1.1582881#

Product Family Design Knowledge Representation, Aggregation, Reuse, and Analysis

A flexible information model for systematic development and deployment of product families during all phases of the product realization process is crucial for product-oriented organizations. In current practice, information captured while designing products in a family is often incomplete, unstructured, and is mostly proprietary in nature, making it difficult to index, search, refine, reuse, distribute, browse, aggregate, and analyze knowledge across heterogeneous organizational information systems. To this end, we propose a flexible knowledge management framework to capture, reorganize, and convert both linguistic and parametric product family design information into a unified network, which is called a networked bill of material (NBOM) using formal concept analysis (FCA); encode the NBOM as a cyclic, labeled graph using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) that designers can use to explore, search, and aggregate design information across different phases of product design as well as across multiple products in a product family; and analyze the set of products in a product family based on both linguistic and parametric information. As part of the knowledge management framework, a PostgreSQL database schema has been formulated to serve as a central design repository of product design knowledge, capable of housing the instances of the NBOM. Ontologies encoding the NBOM are utilized as a metalayer in the database schema to connect the design artifacts as part of a graph structure. Representing product families by preconceived common ontologies shows promise in promoting component sharing, and assisting designers search, explore, and analyze linguistic and parametric product family design information. An example involving a family of seven one-time-use cameras with different functions that satisfy a variety of customer needs is presented to demonstrate the implementation of the proposed framework.

Exploring Semantic Web Technologies for Product Family Modeling

By sharing product design information across a family of products, companies can increase the flexibility and responsiveness of their product realization process while shortening lead-times and reducing cost. This paper describes a preliminary attempt at using semantic web paradigm, especially the Web Ontology Language (OWL), for product family information management. An overview of the ongoing work with Semantic Web is also presented. Formal product representation using OWL can not only store the structure of the product family but also help in capturing the evolution of different components of the product family. As an illustration, a group of single-use cameras, containing several products from the Kodak single-use camera family, is represented in OWL format. The methodology of ontology development that can support product family design is discussed in detail. Product family design representation using OWL promotes better learning across products and reduced development time, system complexity, and product design lead-time.Copyright

A Methodology to Support Product Family Redesign Using Genetic Algorithm and Commonality Indices

Many of today’s manufacturing companies are using platform-based product development to realize families of products with sufficient variety to meet customers’ demands while keeping costs relatively low. The challenge when designing or redesigning a product family is in resolving the tradeoff between product commonality and distinctiveness. Several methodologies have been proposed to redesign existing product families; however, a problem with most of these methods is that they require a considerable amount of information that is not often readily available, and hence their use has been limited. In this research, we propose a methodology to help designers during product family redesign. This methodology is based on the use of a genetic algorithm and commonality indices - metrics to assess the level of commonality within a product family. Unlike most other research in which the redesign of a product family is the result of many human computations, the proposed methodology reduces human intervention and improves accuracy, repeatability, and robustness of the results. Moreover, it is based on data that is relatively easy to acquire. As an example, a family of computer mice is analyzed using the Product Line Commonality Index. Recommendations are given at the product family level (assessment of the overall design of the product family), and at the component level (which components to redesign and how to redesign them). The methodology provides a systematic methodology for product family redesign.Copyright

Product Family Representation and Redesign: Increasing Commonality Using Formal Concept Analysis

In this paper we propose a framework based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) that can be applied systematically to (1) visualize a product family (PF) and (2) improve commonality in the product family. Within this framework, the components of a PF are represented as a complete lattice structure using FCA. A Hasse diagram composed of the lattice structure graphically represents all the products, components, and the relationships between products and components in the PF. The lattice structure is then analyzed to identify prospective components to redesign to improve commonality. We propose two approaches as part of this PF redesign methodology: (1) Component-Based approach, and (2) Product-Based approach. In the Component-Based approach, emphasis is given to a single component that could be shared among the products in a PF to increase commonality. In the Product-Based approach, multiple products from a PF are selected, and commonality is improved among the selected products. Various commonality indices are used to assess the degree of commonality within a PF during its redesign. In this paper, we apply the framework to represent and redesign a family of one-time-use cameras. Besides increasing the understanding of the interaction between components in a PF, the framework explicitly captures the redesign process for improving commonality using FCA.Copyright

A Unified Information Model for Product Family Design Management

A flexible information model for systematic development and deployment of product families during all phases of the product realization process is crucial for product-oriented organizations. In this paper we propose a unified information model to capture, share, and organize product design contents, concepts, and contexts across different phases of the product realization process using a web ontology language (OWL) representation. Representing product families by preconceived common ontologies shows promise in promoting component sharing while facilitating search and exploration of design information over various phases and spanning multiple products in a family. Three distinct types of design information, namely, (1) customer needs, (2) product functions, and (3) product components captured during different phases of the product realization process, are considered in this paper to demonstrate the proposed information model. Product vector and function component mapping matrices along with the common ontologies are utilized for designer-initiated information exploration and aggregation. As a demonstration, six products from a family of power tools are represented in OWL DL (Description Logic) format, capturing distinct information needed during the various phases of product realization.Copyright

Graphical methods for robust design of a semiconductor burn-in process

Discrete-event simulation is a common tool for the analysis of semiconductor manufacturing systems. With the aid of a simulation model, and in conjunction with sensitivity analysis and metamodeling techniques, robust design can be performed to optimize a system. Robust design problems often include integer decision variables. This paper shows a graphical approach to robust design that is effective in the presence of discrete or qualitative variables. The graphical robust design methodology was applied to a backend semiconductor manufacturing process. Changes in specific resource capacities and product mix were examined to determine their effect on the level and variance of cycle time and work in process.

ATLAS: Big Data Storage and Analytics Tool for ATM Researchers

This paper presents the architecture and development of ATLAS, a data warehousing and Big Data analytics tool for Air Traffic Management (ATM) researchers. The paper describes the motivation behind the development of this tool and provides the design considerations and constraints for the development process. ATLAS is designed to be a multi-level, multiobjective tool for Big Data analysis that extracts ATM data from a variety of ATM data stores and prepares it for holistic analysis within an actionable timeline. ATLAS aims to be an intelligent repository for a variety of ATM data and would allow users to combine datasets, query and analyze them. Instead of downloading, cleaning, ingesting, and querying a small subset of one or multiple datasets, manually, the user could use ATLAS for all those steps with the click of a button. ATLAS leverages on recent Big Data tools and techniques of nonrelational databases, map reduce, resilient distributed datasets, and distributed file system storage to optimize the flow of ATM data from the repository to the user. The tool architecture allows for deployment on private or public cloud infrastructure and can be accessed via a website that acts as ATLAS portal for the end user. The web portal supports upload/ingestion of raw data, data quality checks, querying a subset of data, downloading data, and even provides REST end points. This paper presents the advances made towards ATLAS thus far.

Applying a disparate network of models for complex airspace problems

Modeling and simulation in the aviation community is characterized by specialized models built to solve specific problems. Some models are statistically-based, relying on averages and distribution functions using Monte-Carlo techniques to answer policy questions. Others are physics-based, relying on differential equations describing such phenomena as the physics of flight, communication errors and frequency congestion, noise production, atmospheric wake generation, and other phenomena to provide detailed insight into study questions. Several years ago, researchers at Intelligent Automation, Incorporated (IAI) recognized that many of the physics-based aviation models, while conceptually similar, were difficult to interoperate because of varying assumptions regarding particular aspects of flight dynamics. Despite this difficulty, the aviation community routinely use these diverse physics-based models for a single coherent study. IAI researchers have since constructed an automated method for interoperating these models in a manner that produces consistent, coherent, and comparable results even with computations that otherwise use different assumptions.