Research on Knowledge Expression of ETO Product for Mass Customization

Engineering-to-order (ETO) product is the most complicated order-type product with manifold knowledge. Increase in parts and design complexity of ETO product lead to different reasoning and knowledge´s consistency maintenance. Aiming at these problems, a composite method of configuration knowledge expression based on ontology and tabular layouts of article characteristics (TLAC) is proposed. Here is ontology used to describe configuration constraint or rules among modules. TLAC is utilized to express the hiberarchy and assemble relations of components in configuration model. This method realizes formalized knowledge expression of ETO product and facilitates sharing and reuse of domain knowledge. Finally, an example was given to verify the effectiveness of the above method.