Guided systems engineering by profiled ontologies

Abstract

Engineering phase specific tailored views on data are required to prevent over-engineering and to discover missing elements. This paper presents an approach to enhance a semantic Conceptual Data Model (CDM) to define the specific behavior of engineering phases. Therefore, a CDM gets enhanced by an ontology profile to specify required and non-admissible features for each engineering phase. This is exploited to enhance exis­ting transformations from Web Ontology Language (OWL) to Eclipse Modeling Language (EMF) to generate phase specific decorators representing the corresponding views on data items. The approach also supports engineering phase specific handling of constraints and rules that further augment the guidance of engineers through the system development process by applying knowledge management functions such as reasoning. As a result, the presented approach reveals a notably higher data quality and offers more analysis potential by enabling phase-specific definitions of views on data and specification of semantic checks on CDM level. Several use cases from aerospace engineering have been analyzed and the improvements in areas such as inconsistency detection, knowledge derivation, and guided system modeling are highlighted in this paper.