PDSIDES—A Knowledge-Based Platform for Decision Support in the Design of Engineering Systems

Abstract

We hypothesize that by providing decision support for designers we can speed up the design process and facilitate the creation of quality cost-effective designs. One of the challenges in providing design decision support is that the decision workflows embody various degrees of complexity due to the inherent complexity embodied in engineering systems. To tackle this, we propose a knowledge-based Platform for Decision Support in the Design of Engineering Systems (PDSIDES). PDSIDES is built on our earlier works that are anchored in modeling decision-related knowledge with templates using ontologies to facilitate execution and reuse. In this paper, we extend the ontological decision templates to a computational platform that provides knowledge-based decision support for three types of users, namely, template creators, template editors, and template implementers, in original design, adaptive design, and variant design, respectively. The efficacy of PDSIDES is demonstrated using a hot rod rolling system (HRRS) design example.