(208c) Product Design Via Integrated Information System

Due to dynamic market needs, growing industrial competitiveness and strict environmental regulations, companies are focusing more on systematic product design. Product design is a problem-solving activity, where all candidate solutions are screened in terms of specified list of requirements involving design materials, product personality, function, price and environmental aspects etc. However, any new product development is a complex business process that involves cross-function integration as well as interdisciplinary activities that require different types of knowledge inputs^[1]. One of the fast and reliable approaches for product design is to use knowledge base to select product candidates matching their desired properties^[2]. But the main complexity lies in management of these knowledge bases as different types of chemicals and/or materials require different databases with their system specific ontologies for knowledge representation^[3,4]. For example, different databases are needed for solvents, aroma compounds, active ingredients in different types of functional products, refrigerants, membranes, adsorbents, and many more. Since different product types have different sets of property requirements, their ontologies for knowledge representation are also different. For example, solvents and membranes are characterized with different sets of properties.

In this work a novel and versatile integrated information system (knowledge base) with their system specific ontologies is presented. This knowledge base can be used for design of a wide range of chemical products, ranging from materials such as zeolites (used in adsorption), membranes (used in gas separation, pervaporation, etc.); chemicals such as solvents (formulated products, solvent-based separations, etc.), aroma compounds (functional formulated products), active ingredients (medicinal products, formulated products, etc.), lipids (as additives in formulated products) and many more. Data have been collected and organized into system specific ontologies, which helps to retrieve the needed data as well as to store new data. The knowledge base is linked to a computer aided chemical product design tool-box (ProCAPD), which guides the user through the steps of the work-flow of specific product design problems. The linked knowledge base provides the needed data for each step of the work-flow. The presentation will highlight the knowledge base, the system specific ontologies, the framework of ProCAPD through which the needed data are retrieved for several product design problems.

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