Ontology and CBR based automated decision-making method for the disassembly of mechanical products. Issue 3 (August 2016) - Chen, Shaoli
Highlights: Combining CBR with ontology makes the proposed method has a general applicability. Ontology enables the automation of the CBR/RBR based decision-making process. Ontology realises the integration, reusing, and sharing of disassembly knowledge. Ontology based RBR complements the deficiency of CBR when lack of applicative cases. The proposed method has been implemented by a program and verified by a case study. Abstract: This paper proposes an ontology and CBR (case-based reasoning) based method which overcomes the difficulty for computers to understand complex structures of various mechanical products and makes the disassembly decision-making process of the products fully automated and cost-saving. In this method, (1) ontology concept is applied to the disassembly decision-making. This enables computers to understand and self-reason the CBR/RBR (rule-based reasoning) based disassembly decision-making process. Since ontology uniforms different kinds of disassembly-related knowledge from different sources, the integration and sharing of the knowledge could be achieved; (2) high flexible decision-making to various conditions with high quality is achieved by the combination of ontology and CBR; (3) to achieve the decision-making when CBR fails, an ontology based RBR method is designed to complement the shortage of CBR in the disassembly decision-making field. The paper also presents an application program to realise the proposed method. In addition, a case study is analysed to verify the validity and automation of the program.