Feature-based product modelling: an ontological approach

Feature-based modelling is the leading approach for computer-based product design. The development of knowledge-based information systems brought to represent features in formalised ontologies. The lack of a clear ontological analysis of how features are understood in engineering led to formal models that treat features in an ambiguous manner, or reduce them to pure geometric elements. The purpose of the paper is to present a modular ontological architecture to support the explicit and machine treatment of features' semantic. Differently from the state of art, we provide a general framework where features are contextualised within a larger system for product knowledge representation. We focus on the fundamental (ontological) properties that features satisfy independently from specific applications and contexts of usage. The paper presents modelling case studies where the proposed ontologies are used to represent and (automatically) reason over product knowledge, and to analyse, compare, and integrate existing features classifications.