KBE TEMPLATE UPDATE PROPAGATION SUPPORT

Ontology and Algorithm for Update Sequence Computation

Olivier Kuhn

1,2,3

, Thomas Dusch

, Parisa Ghodous

and Pierre Collet

Universit

e de Lyon, CNRS, LIRIS, UMR5202, F-69622, Lyon, France

Universit

e de Strasbourg, CNRS, LSIIT, UMR7005, F-67412, Strasbourg, France

PROSTEP AG, Darmstadt, Germany

Keywords:

Ontology, Update strategy, Knowledge-based engineering, KBE templates, Ranking.

Abstract:

This paper presents an approach to support Knowledge-Based Engineering template update propagation. Our

aim is to provide engineers with a sequence of documents, giving the order in which they have to be processed

to update them. To be able to compute a sequence, we need information about templates, Computer-Aided

Design models and their relations. We designed an ontology for this purpose that will, after inferring new

knowledge, provide a comprehensive knowledge about the templates and assemblies. This information is then

used by a ranking algorithm that we have developed, which provides the sequence to follow to be able to

update models efﬁciently without a deep analysis of the dependencies. This will prevent mistakes and save

time as the analysis and choices are automatically computed.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, high-end industries such as automotive or

aerospace industries are designing products that are

more and more complex and that integrate various

disciplines. The product diversiﬁcation and the in-

crease of the model range has motivated new IT tools

and has impacted the product development process

(Katzenbach et al., 2007). One change during the

last years is the democratisation of Knowledge-Based

Engineering (KBE) which has become a standard in

product development. KBE is a large ﬁeld at the

crossroads of Computer-Aided Design (CAD), artiﬁ-

cial intelligence and programming. It facilitates the

reuse of knowledge from previous design choices and

thus reduces design time and costs. Standardization

is also a way to reuse knowledge. Furthermore, Du-

denh

offer (2000) said that the standardisation and the

use of common parts and platforms is a key factor for

efﬁciency in the automotive industry. One solution to

reuse knowledge is the use of KBE templates.

KBE templates are intelligent documents or fea-

tures that aim at storing know-how and facilitate its

reuse. They are designed to adapt themselves to var-

ious contexts, which can lead to some maintenance

problems. Maintaining a huge number of templates is

quite a challenging task because of the many relations

created with other documents. Modiﬁcations can be

made to templates to add new functionalities or ﬁx

some bugs. This is why there is a need to propagate

these modiﬁcations to existing copies of the template,

called instances, that are used in a speciﬁc context, for

instance, an engine assembly.

The work presented in this paper targets the prob-

lematic of template update propagation. We use

an ontological representation of templates and CAD

models to infer new knowledge. This knowledge

is then used to compute an update sequence, which

can then be used by engineers in charge of propagat-

ing changes. With this tool, we remove the task of

analysing dependencies between documents and eval-

uating the impact of the relations on the update prop-

agation.

This paper is structured as follows. In section 2

the problematic is presented. Section 3 presents sev-

eral research works related to KBE templates. Section

4 describes our approach. In section 5, we present the

developed ontology. Section 6 presents how we com-

pute an update sequence for the update propagation.

In section 7 an application of the work is presented.

Finally, in section 8 some conclusions are given.

Kuhn O., Dusch T., Ghodous P. and Collet P. (2010).

KBE TEMPLATE UPDATE PROPAGATION SUPPORT - Ontology and Algorithm for Update Sequence Computation.

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Artiﬁcial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems, pages

5-12

DOI: 10.5220/0002867100050012

 SciTePress

2 TEMPLATE UPDATE

PROBLEMATIC

2.1 KBE Template Deﬁnition

The aim of Knowledge-Based Engineering is to cap-

ture and reuse the intent and product design knowl-

edge through parameters, rules, formulas, automa-

tion, and also knowledge templates. The reuse of

knowledge allows to speed up the design process by

reducing design recreation and to save costs. The

ultimate goal is to capture information related to

best-practices and design know-how in a company.

Knowledge-Based Engineering is nowadays used by

many companies and has proven its advantages. Ex-

amples of enhancements resulting from the use of

KBE are presented in (Gay, 2000; Chapman and Pin-

fold, 2001).

Templates are knowledge-based applications that

allow the storage and the reuse of know-how and

company best practices. Knowledge-based applica-

tions include a wide set of elements that contains

documents, parametric CAD models, software, KBE,

CAE analyses etc. They are designed in order to adapt

themselves to a given context regarding some deﬁned

inputs given by the context. The process of putting

a template into a context and setting the inputs of

the template is called “instantiation.” For instance, in

CATIA V5, a Dassault CAD system, the instantiation

process will create a copy of the template, which we

call “template instance,” then put it into the context

and ﬁnally link the elements from the context to the

template instance’s inputs. At the end of the process

we have two entities that have separate life cycles: the

template deﬁnition and its template instance.

In addition to knowledge storage, templates are

also used to provide standardized parts and assem-

blies for design activities, and to integrate proven de-

sign solutions into future product design processes

(Katzenbach et al., 2007). Katzenbach et al. (2007)

also exposed that the mandatory use of template-

based design processes enhances the design maturity

during the complete design phase. Moreover, Kam-

rani and Vijayan (2006) showed an integrated design

approach based on templates technologies that allows

to reduce drastically the development time needed for

new products.

Figure 1 presents the generic structure of an as-

sembly template instance in a context. The context

is composed of several entities called the “external

speciﬁcations,” which are other elements present in

the context that will provide parameters’ value or ge-

ometry to the template. The inputs of the template are

gathered in the “adapter model,” which is composed

Template Context

Concept

model

Publications

Design

speciﬁcations

Publications

Components

Publications

External

speciﬁcations

Adapter

model

Publications

Construction

Publications

Output

Publications

Template instance

Figure 1: Generic structure of a CAD template with link

ﬂow (Arndt et al., 2006).

of basic geometry to guide the “construction.” The

“output” is used to present some speciﬁc elements of

the template to the context. References to other doc-

uments are based on publications. The aim of using

publications is to provide a named reference of an el-

ement within the document, that can be easily recog-

nised and referred to. So if the content of a document

changes, the links between documents will not be bro-

ken as we do not refer directly to the elements inside

the document. The ﬁgure also presents the link ﬂow

(represented by arrows) that represents the hierarchy

of the model.

2.2 Addressed Problematic

In large and complex assemblies like those present

in automotive or aerospace industries, the number of

templates and template instances can reach several

thousands and even more. This implies a huge effort

to maintain them as they become more complex by

incorporating new potential variants for future design

(Katzenbach et al., 2007). There is a second challenge

regarding template update, that concerns the propa-

gation of the modiﬁcations done to templates. Luk-

ibanov (2005) initiated this problematic of template

management because Product Data Management sys-

tems and CAD software did not address it to a full ex-

tent. Once a template has been modiﬁed and validated

in order to suit new requirements or ﬁx some bugs,

changes should be propagated to other templates and

their instances to use the same version everywhere.

The complexity of the problem comes from the

heterogeneity of the data. There are several types of

documents that can be linked together for several rea-

ICEIS 2010 - 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

Launch

update

(a)

(b)

Analyse do cument

Update ontology

instances

Run inference

engine

Compute up date

sequence

Update

template instances

Updated documents

New do cument or new document version

Figure 2: Developed process for template update propagation.

sons such as a parameter dependency, parent-child re-

lation etc. All these relations may have an impact on

the propagation of updates. The relations have to be

analysed and represented in a suitable format in order

to allow a computer software to take advantage of the

knowledge, to analyse the current state and to create

a sequence of updates.

In this paper, we address the template update prop-

agation to instances. Our objective is to provide engi-

neers with a sequence of necessary updates, in order

to help them to achieve the template instances updates

faster and with less difﬁculties and errors.

3 RELATED WORK

KBE templates is a recent technology that has be-

come the purpose of many research works and ap-

plications. The ability of templates to adapt them-

selves to a given context has been used by Siddique

and Boddu (2005) to integrate the customer into the

design process. They proposed a mass customisation

CAD framework that takes into account user param-

eters to automatically generate a CAD model from

predeﬁned templates. The automotive industry has

also integrated templates into their development pro-

cesses. Haasis et al. (2007) and Katzenbach et al.

(2007) presented the template-based process at Daim-

ler AG, an automotive enterprise. There will be a need

in the future to standardize component concepts be-

tween product families to face the complexity of prod-

ucts and processes. The solution they have adopted is

to resort to KBE templates in the engineering process.

Mbang (2008) proposed the use of KBE templates to

integrate together Product, Process and Resource as-

pects, in order to make it seamless to the designers.

Some research have been made concerning tem-

plate maintenance. Lukibanov (2005) addressed the

problem of template management and distributing the

latest versions of templates. The proposed solution

involves ontologies that are used as a knowledge rep-

resentation layer about templates and their intercon-

nections. An ontology allows to represent concepts

and relationships between these concepts (Mizuguchi,

2003). Ontologies also provide a solution to ﬁnd de-

pendencies and to check the consistency of the on-

tology thanks to an inference process. One ontology

is created from each templates by mapping them to

the knowledge model. Each ontology describes the

inputs, outputs and links to CAD models of the corre-

sponding template, and uses the visualisation of these

information to propagate changes to other templates.

However his approach does not handle template in-

stances and focuses on the CATIA V5 CAD system.

4 APPROACH

To propagate modiﬁcations to template instances, we

need to take into account the propagation to other

templates because templates can be linked together,

but they can also be composed of instances of other

templates. This is why we propose to adapt and ex-

tend the approach presented by Lukibanov (2005) to

take into account template instances and to try to ab-

stract the methodology so that it can be applied to var-

ious CAD systems.

Figure 2 presents the process we have developed

to propagate the template modiﬁcations. The process

is decomposed into two main parts.

In the ﬁrst part (ﬁgure 2.a), we handle an infor-

mation database about templates and CAD models.

We have considered that having one ontology for each

template does not scale well as we will also handle

data on template instances and other assemblies. The

solution we propose is to deﬁne one domain ontol-

ogy based on the analysis of template concepts, CAD

systems and existing ontologies. Concepts in our on-

tology will be instantiated by analysing CAD mod-

els and templates to gather relevant information for

the template update propagation. Data retrieved from

CAD models are raw data. Some information is not

visible or incomplete regarding our needs. For this

reason, we use an inference engine on the instantiated

ontology to enhance the classiﬁcation and discover in-

formation not directly accessible in the CAD models.

This ontology is presented in section 5.

The second part is dedicated to the propagation of

changes (ﬁgure 2.b). We take advantage of inferred

knowledge to compute an update sequence to support

engineers in their tasks. Locating all relevant tem-

plate instances incorporated in huge assemblies and

KBE TEMPLATE UPDATE PROPAGATION SUPPORT - Ontology and Algorithm for Update Sequence Computation

estimating the consequences of the necessary changes

to be made could easily be a full time job. Further-

more, some relations are not explicitly available and

their impact on the update has to be estimated. This

is why we propose an algorithm that is in charge of

computing an update sequence. This algorithm takes

advantage of the knowledge of the domain we have

gathered in the ontology and of the enriched infor-

mation on the templates and models available in the

ontology. More details are given in section 6.

5 ONTOLOGY DESIGN

5.1 Aim of the Ontology

To generate an update sequence, the algorithm re-

quires information about the type of the documents

and the existing relations between documents. To pro-

vide these information in a computer understandable

and processable format, we have developed an Ontol-

ogy represented with the Web Ontology Language

(OWL). We have chosen the OWL representation lan-

guage for several reasons. OWL is based on open

standards and is a W3C recommendation since 2004.

Right now, we are using OWL-DL, a sublanguage

which is named in correspondence with Description

Logic on which it is based. It is the largest set of

OWL that provides decidable reasoning procedures.

Katzenbach et al. (2007) pointed out from their

study that relations between documents need an efﬁ-

cient visualisation tool to have an overview on all in-

terdependencies. With this ontology, we want to pro-

vide a classiﬁcation and an efﬁcient overview of all

explicit and implicit dependencies in templates and

assemblies.

5.2 Followed Methodology

To develop our ontology, we decided to use the

Ontology Development 101 methodology (Noy and

McGuinness, 2001) for its simplicity and its lightness.

This methodology is composed of seven steps.

The ﬁrst step is to deﬁne the domain of the ontol-

ogy. The domain of our ontology focuses on our prob-

lematic: concepts and relations are related to KBE,

templates and CAD models. Such speciﬁc ontologies

are called “application ontology.”

To design our ontology, we had a mixed top-down

and bottom-up approach. We started from the con-

cepts and at the same time from a CAD system anal-

http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-guide/

ysis. Our idea is to make them meet so that the ontol-

ogy includes details linked with generic concepts.

The second step of the methodology is to reuse

existing ontologies. We have found no available or

reusable ontology that can be reused for our prob-

lematic. However there are standards in the prod-

uct design ﬁeld from which we can extract and reuse

useful information and concepts. The most famous

is the “STandard for the Exchange of Product model

data” (STEP, 1994) that is also referenced as the ISO

10303 norm. STEP provides standards for product

data representation and covers a broad range of appli-

cations from geometric and topological representation

to kinematics, passing by product life cycle. STEP

can thus provide some elements for the needed ab-

straction level for a generic document representation

in the ontology to ease the integration of other CAD

systems. Then we need to enrich it with a detailed

analysis of the problematic and concrete systems.

5.3 System Analysis

Step three of the methodology is to enumerate the im-

portant terms that will appear in the ontology in order

to deﬁne the concepts and the object properties. For

this purpose, we analysed the CATIA V5 CAD system

from Dassault Systems, that is used in automotive,

aerospace or ship building industries. Our analysis

was focused on knowledge elements and relations be-

tween documents (Multi-Model links in CATIA V5).

CATIA V5 integrates KBE workbenches that pro-

vide KBE template mechanisms to create and instanti-

ate templates. There are three main types of templates

available: feature templates, document templates and

process templates. We deﬁned process templates as

out of the scope of our work because they address

CAx processes and we focus on CAD. It is also possi-

ble to use standard CAD models as templates without

resorting to the speciﬁc CATIA KBE workbench. But

with this method, there are no explicit template deﬁ-

nitions and no support tool for template instantiation.

If we have a look at template instances, we can see

that this term does not exist within CATIA V5. Tem-

plate instances are not handled and are considered as

standard documents with no possibility to recognise

them.

Regarding the relations between documents, we

identiﬁed 19 different types of links. Each link in-

volves two documents, one for the source and the

other for the target of the link. The links do not all

have the same impact on the update propagation. For

this reason we need a classiﬁcation of link types de-

pending on their impact.

From this analysis, we have deﬁned the main

ICEIS 2010 - 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

terms and also some of their relationships. Concern-

ing templates, we have to take into account the spe-

ciﬁc CATIA V5 templates as well as models used as

templates. Terms related to template instances have

also to be taken into account and a solution to track

and classify template instances has to be integrated in

the ontology. Regarding the relations, we classiﬁed

them and created the new term of “dependency link”

that will gather all links that will inﬂuence the update

propagation.

5.4 Ontology Description

Figure 3 presents a part of the developed ontology. In

our mixed approach to design the ontology, we started

from the top by deﬁning the upper level of our ontol-

ogy (blue rectangles) by creating the document def-

inition concepts and relations inspired by the STEP

standard.

Product

Version

Deﬁnition

Document

Instance

Template

CATDocument

CATProduct

CATPart

Document template

is-a

≡

Figure 3: Extract of the ontology with the abstraction level

and the CAD system concepts (here CATIA V5).

Then we deﬁned the CAD system speciﬁc con-

cepts of the ontology (green rounded rectangles)

on the basis of the CATIA terminology and the

new terms we have identiﬁed which are not de-

ﬁned within the CAD system (section 5.3). Those

new concepts are deﬁned acording to existing con-

cepts and relations in order to deduce them with

an inference engine. For instance, we deﬁned a

new concept called “PartAsTemplate,” which de-

ﬁnes a CATPart document that contains no tem-

plate deﬁnition from CATIA V5 but that is used

as a template. Its deﬁnition with Description Log-

ics notation is the following: PartAsTemplate ≡

CAT Part ∩ ¬(∃hasDe f intion.DocumentTemplate) ∩

∃hasID.TemplateID.

Finally, we integrate mid-level concepts such as

system independent template concepts like “tem-

plate” and “template instance” (orange ellipses). All

these concepts are linked together with “is-a,” equiv-

alence or aggregation relationships.

Concerning the relations between documents, we

represented them as object properties. We added the

19 link types present in CATIA V5. To be able to

track instances, we created a relation between tem-

plate deﬁnitions and template instances by adding an

identiﬁer to the models that will be shared between a

template and its instances. We also deﬁned the inverse

links, with the inverse property axiom, to be able to

navigate easier between documents because in CA-

TIA V5, links are unidirectional and a document is

not aware of the presence of a link targeting it.

All these data constitute the foundation to com-

pute an update sequence for the update propagation.

6 UPDATE SEQUENCE

COMPUTATION

Our goal is to provide engineers in charge of propa-

gating changes in template deﬁnitions to its instances

and to other templates with a comprehensive sequence

they can follow. This sequence will give them an or-

dered list of documents (with a corresponding rank)

that have to be updated or replaced. Following this se-

quence rank after rank will save time as the engineers

do not have to analyse the complex situation with all

its interdependencies. This will also prevent redun-

dant or useless updates.

6.1 Graph Representation

The data representation we created with the ontology

can be seen as a directed graph with documents in-

stances as nodes and their relationships as edges. The

speciﬁcity of the obtained graph is that nodes and ver-

tices are typed. Their types depend on the concepts

and object properties they represent, so one node can

have several types. Our algorithm will work on this

graph to extract relevant nodes and to assign them a

rank.

6.2 Approach

We tackled the problem with a ranking approach

based on relations between documents deﬁned in the

ontology. The objective is to build an ordered se-

quence by assigning a rank r

(where k is the rank)

to each document. The rank represents the order in

which documents have to be processed. Several doc-

uments can have the same rank, meaning that they can

be processed at the same time.

Our approach was inspired by research on hi-

erarchical structure visualisation and directed graph

drawing (Gansner et al., 1993; North and Woodhull,

KBE TEMPLATE UPDATE PROPAGATION SUPPORT - Ontology and Algorithm for Update Sequence Computation

2002). The results of their work, is an efﬁcient algo-

rithm to draw hierarchical graphs. An implementation

has been made in graphviz

, an open-source graph vi-

sualisation tool. The initial version of the algorithm

was proposed in (Sugiyama et al., 1981). It is com-

posed of 4 phases:

1. Place the graph nodes in discrete ranks.

2. Order nodes within rank to avoid crossing edges.

3. Compute the coordinates of nodes.

4. Compute edges’ splines.

We focused our interest on the ﬁrst phase where nodes

are ranked.

This method builds a hierarchy composed of n lev-

els, from a directed and acyclic graph. The hierarchy

is denoted G = (V, E, n, σ), where:

• V is a set of vertices such as:

V = V

∪V

∪ ···∪V

∩V

0, i 6= j)

where V

is the set of vertices of rank i and n the

height of the hierarchy.

• E is a set of edges, where each edge is unique.

• σ is a set of sequence σ

for each V

. σ

the sequence of vertices within V

such as σ

, v

, . . . , v

with |V

| the number of vertices of

To create the hierarchy, each directed edge e =

(source,target) has to obey the following condition:

e = (v

, v

) ∈ E, v

∈ V

and v

∈ V

satisﬁes i < j (1)

The result of this phase of the algorithm can be

seen in ﬁgure 4. It has been applied to a small ex-

ample composed of six vertices and six edges. The

result (b) shows three ranks (n = 3) and validates the

condition presented in equation 1.

B C

(a)

A B

CD E

(b)

Figure 4: Acyclic directed graph (a) and its result (b) after

the ﬁrst phase of the (Sugiyama et al., 1981) algorithm.

We adapted and extended this ranking algorithm

to make it produce an update sequence for the tem-

plate update propagation.

http://www.graphviz.org/

6.3 Adaptation of the Algorithm

The data from templates and models generate a more

complex graph as the relations and links between the

documents can have various effects on the update

propagation. This is why we use the classiﬁcation

made in the ontology.

In our approach we do not take into account the

sequences σ as we are just interested in placing docu-

ments in the good rank.

The original modiﬁed documents are the inputs of

the algorithm and will be placed at the ﬁrst rank r = 1.

Starting from these documents, the algorithm builds

the hierarchy. We query the ontology for the types

of documents and the links that propagate the update

from these documents. Depending on the types of the

documents, several actions can be undertaken. The

documents linked with an “inverse dependency link”

are added at rank r + 1 as they have to be processed

after the dependency is satisﬁed. Then the algorithm

continues with the rank r + 1 where the documents

were just added. If the current document is a tem-

plate, the behaviour is different. As templates may

be containers, the re-instantiation of a template has to

be done after all the included documents have been

updated.

To be able to perform a re-instantiation, we need

to load the document that contains the template in-

stance before doing the action. So if r

is the rank of

the template instance, its containing assembly parent

should be located in a previous rank such as its rank

parent

< t

. The worst case complexity of the result-

ing algorithm is linear (O(h) with h the total number

of nodes).

7 APPLICATION

7.1 Developments

The presented approach has been implemented in a

system composed of two parts.

The ﬁrst part is CAD system dependant. In our

case we used CATIA V5 and the C++ CAA API to

analyse CAD models and templates. Data extracted

are then transferred in an XML format to the second

part of our system.

The second part is in charge of maintaining the on-

tology instances and computing the update sequence.

We developed a JAVA application using the OWL-

API

to manipulate the OWL ontology and the in-

ference engine. The presented ontology was cre-

http://owlapi.sourceforge.net

ICEIS 2010 - 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

ated using Prot

e 4

(Noy et al., 2001) that is an

open source ontology editor. The implementation

of our update sequence computation algorithm was

also done in JAVA as it uses the OWL-API to ac-

cess the ontology data. Concerning the inference en-

gine, we have chosen FACT++ (Tsarkov and Hor-

rocks, 2006), an efﬁcient OWL-DL reasoner directly

usable through the OWL-API.

7.2 Scenario

Our scenario uses the CATIA V5 CAD system. The

scenario is composed of 92 CAD models of differ-

ent types (CATParts, CATProducts, CATIA V4 mod-

els). Within this set of documents are 9 templates:

8 document templates with some of them containing

instances from other templates and 1 “User Deﬁned

Feature,” which is a feature template like a predeﬁned

hole.

Our study case starts with the modiﬁcation of ge-

ometry elements in one document template. We con-

sider that the template has been validated and is ready

to be used. We want now to update related documents

and all instances to have up-to-date models.

Without any support tool, the persons in charge

of propagating the modiﬁcations will have to locate

all the related template instances and related docu-

ments through links and references. Once they have

all these information, they can make the necessary

changes. Finally, the new modiﬁcations may also

have some consequences on other templates or their

instances. . . all these steps are time consuming and

can lead to mistakes or leaving out some documents.

7.3 Application and Results

First of all, we need up-to-date information of tem-

plates and CAD models. Currently we analyse all

models and recreate instances in the deﬁned ontology

without instances (in the future we plan to enable in-

cremental updates because the full analysis is rather

time consuming). After this step, we have a compre-

hensive overview of models and their relationships.

Then the user has to select the modiﬁed templates and

launch the update sequence computation.

An example of result for one modiﬁed template is

presented in ﬁgure 5. The 92 models problem was

computed in approximately 300 ms on a Pentium M

1.8Ghz. It shows the documents (boxes) that have to

be updated and the order in which they have to be pro-

cessed. The ﬁrst documents to be handled are located

at rank 1. The dotted arrows represent the “instance

location link,” which is the link from a template to one

http://protege.standfort.edu/

Figure 5: Example of update sequence.

of its instances. The other arrows target a document

contained in the link source document. Other types of

relations present in the ontology can also be shown.

Engineers are thus provided with means to merely

follow the sequence rank after rank, load given doc-

uments and apply the changes. This eliminates the

unproductive task of searching relations through doc-

uments and their documentation and the focus can be

put on the updates.

8 CONCLUSIONS AND

PERSPECTIVES

In this paper, we presented a solution to propagate

changes made in KBE templates to their instances

and related documents. Update propagation is a com-

plex and time consuming task. The complexity comes

from the size and the heterogeneity of the network

representing documents and their relations. The so-

lution proposed aims at supporting engineers in the

task of updating related templates and instances after

template deﬁnitions were modiﬁed.

The main beneﬁts of this approach are the speedup

of the global task of propagating template updates,

as well as to avoid incomplete updates. In a set of

several thousand of models, it is hard to have a good

overview of all dependencies to ﬁnd needed informa-

tion. This is even more complex due to non-explicit

relations and links that are not represented within the

CAD system such as, for example, the template in-

stances location.

Our approach is based on an OWL ontology that

we deﬁned from the analysis of the problematic and

KBE TEMPLATE UPDATE PROPAGATION SUPPORT - Ontology and Algorithm for Update Sequence Computation

CATIA V5 as example. This ontology also includes

an abstract level composed of concepts inspired from

the STEP standard, to facilitate the integration of

other CAD systems. The aim of the ontology is to

represent knowledge from KBE templates and CAD

models. We also resort to a reasoner on the ontol-

ogy to infer knowledge that is not provided by the

data extraction from KBE templates and CAD mod-

els. These information are then used by a ranking al-

gorithm that will provide an update sequence to sup-

port engineers.

Further improvements can be made to enhance

the global process of changes propagation. The ﬁrst

would be to automate the model update or template

instance replacement. It would also be interesting to

investigate OWL 2, which has become a W3C rec-

ommendation in October 2009, to evaluate its bene-

ﬁts comparing to OWL DL for data representation.

Further investigations will include the test of our ap-

proach on real industrial cases to evaluate its perfor-

mance on large assemblies.

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