Ontology-driven and rules-based system for management and pricing of family of product.

Abstract

This report presents an approach to product family management using semantic technologies. There is a need for more flexible configuration management and pricing, explicitly representing domain knowledge and configuration rules. The thesis investigates requirements, needs and current issues to support product family in order to figure out the best candidate technologies. Ontology and rules are chosen to carry out the project. Our approach is applied to a case study provided by Det Norske Veritas Software, a company offering solutions for maritime, offshore and process industries. The contacts with the company have strengthened our work as the client helped us to clarify the problem and validate the suggested method. The report discusses pros and cons of semantic technologies applied in this context. Semantic technologies and rules help to create highly flexible system that allows supporting product family engineering. Our work highlights consistency improvements and redundancy diminution in features models.