Integration of Ontologies and Constraint Satisfaction Problems for Product Configuration

In this work, the domain is a product or system configuration. We focus on ontologies, Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs), and their integration. The aim is to capitalize knowledge and define mechanisms that will permit reasoning to find configuration problem solutions regarding customers' requirements. On one hand, an ontology is used to formalize and capitalize knowledge about products or systems structure including concepts, systems, subsystems, components, relationships, attributes, and their possible values. Protégé 5.5.0 is used to create the ontology. On the other hand, we used CSPs to formalize the relationships between attributes values or between concepts that are allowed or forbidden. CSPs (restricted to compatibility tables) are translated into rules to be integrated into the ontology using the SWRL. Therefore, we defined a filtering algorithm based on arc consistency to restrict the domains by removing inconsistent values. First, related works on ontologies, CSPs are presented. The formalization of the ontology, CSPs, and their translation into SWRL rules and their use are presented. Finally, an illustrative application based on the configuration of a simplified bike is presented.