Ontology-Based Feature Modeling and Combination for Kansei Engineering

Nowadays consumers' affective responses have become more and more helpful for developing successful products. Kansei Engineering (KE) is a challenging customer-oriented technology for product development in the intelligent age. It should not only translate the humans' feeling into design specifications, but also share classified design knowledge and integrate design features to get a new design scheme automatically. In this paper, an ontology-based systematic approach is proposed to establish a Kansei Engineering System (KES). The approach is based on a hierarchical ontology model and a feature combination mechanism. In our ontology model, design elements and items are divided into several hierarchies according to the expertise and the results of statistical analysis. The source data is from Kansei Evaluation Experiment. The classification of design features is used to decide the priority during feature selection and combination. In the present study, the hierarchical model is applied to establish an intelligent system for card design to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.