Process Integration and Design Optimization Ontologies for Next Generation Engineering

The recent years have seen a significant increase in ontology research in the field of engineering due to the needs of domain knowledge capturing, reusing and sharing between software agents and/or engineers. The increasingly available enhancements of computing resources have considerably increased the role of Computer-aided engineering applications in the product development process by saving time and costs. In this context a key role is played by the Process Integration and Design Optimization tools that facilitate and automate the integration and interoperability of all different Enterprise Applications involved in the simulation of engineering tasks. However, all these tools inherit a severe limitation about the semantic meaning of the tools they automate. This paper proposes a platform independent Process Integration and Design Optimization (PIDO) ontology that aims at providing an extensive mapping of the PIDO domain, with a special attention to its adoption in software applications. A comparison with existing similar ontologies and an explanation of the reasons that lay behind the classes and relations introduced is provided. Finally, a real application case is illustrated along with the related main benefits.