Automated product design and development using evolutionary ontology

Abstract

The nowadays trend in product design is the creation of an ontology containing all components of a manufacturer along with their features. It is expected that a huge amount of information will be available in the near future. The problem that arises is how all these ontologies may be explored in an automatic way. And moreover, if it is possible to automatically create new products in a bottom-up fashion using the available knowledge about existing components. We use a genetic algorithm which represents individuals as ontologies rather than fixed mathematical structures. This allows the creation, recombination and selection of dynamic products, with a variable number of components, which may interrelate in different ways. We prove that such an algorithm may provide to the product designer a series of innovative products which can be refined further for commercial purposes.