Ontology-based representation of meta-design in designing decision workflows

Utilizing the enterprise capital related the knowledge of design processes has become a crucial to improve enterprise agility and respond to shifts or changes in markets. The complexity and uncertainty of design processes raise the challenge of capturing tacit knowledge and the ability to provide assistance in designing design processes. In this paper, an ontology is proposed for capturing, representing and documenting the knowledge related to hierarchical decision workflows in the meta-design of complex engineered systems. The ontology is developed in the context of Decision Support Problem Technique (DSPT), taking into account the requirements being able to guide assistance in designing design workflows, and integrating problem, product and process information in a design decision-making process. Then, the method of building procedure and design of process templates are presented to facilitate the reuse of the populated template instances in future design. Finally, the meta-design of the heat exchanger in a small thermal system is presented as an example to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach.