From Dispersed Knowledge to Ontology: A Proposal for Formalizing and Integrating 4D Printing in Design
Résumé
Current research efforts related to 4D printing (4DP) has reached an unprecedented level in smart materials (SM) driven era. It is mainly about manufacturing parts/products combining additive manufacturing (AM) techniques and reactive matters. The latter association leads to transformable products presenting abilities of shape morphing, colour changing, etc., after being triggered with adequate stimuli. Thus, many ad-hoc solutions appeared in literature, in the last decade, with different dispersed expertises. Indeed, the information available about how to carry such smart products automatically is limited and poorly known. This lack of common core knowledge is primarily due to the various skills involved in printing stimuli-reactive products. Hence, different user profiles, i.e. the product designer, product architect, process planner, etc., cannot take profit from this pioneering technology. Thus, the product design process must incorporate such technology to tackle design for 4DP issues. In this context, this paper proposes a framework that starts from establishing an ontological structure for the semantic and logical description of smart products respecting multi-dimensionalism (three- and four-dimensional objects), semantic reasoning theories and description logic language. The latter describes formally the proposed ontology and defines knowledge extraction from the above-mentioned ontology respecting some user profiles needs. At the end, a strategy for integrating this federated knowledge in cognitive CAD methods and tools is deployed.