Ontology-based interoperation model of collaborative product development

The reuse of existing systems is an important objective of High Level Architecture (HLA) based collaborative product development systems. However, in order to reuse an existing system, its interoperation interface has to be modified so as to comply with the objective and interaction representations defined in a corresponding Federation Object Model (FOM). Such modifications imply added time and effort, which diminishes the efficiency of system reuse in collaborative product development. This paper presents a heavy-weighted ontology-based construction method for interoperation models to support the reuse of subsystems in various collaborative contexts. In this method ontologies are used to specify the semantics of object classes and interaction classes in subsystems in a formal and computer readable fashion. In doing so, a Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) like construction method is introduced to establish the original interoperation ontology from scratch. An automatic transforming method from Simulation Object Model (SOM) into interoperation ontology is also described to make existing HLA based systems easy to adopt this approach. Then a consistency verification method is introduced to guarantee the consistency of the interoperation ontologies. A case study is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method. As a human-friendly modeling method, compared with existing interoperation modeling methods the proposed method is more flexible, efficient and reliable.