A REQUIREMENT ONTOLOGY FOR ENGINEERING DESIGN

We present an ontology for representing requirements that supports a g eneric requirements management process in engineering design domain. T he requirement ontology we propose is a part of a more general ontolog y to capture engineering design knowledge. Objects included in this ge neral ontology are parts, features, requirements, and constraints. We define a generic requirements management process and raise issues that any requirement representation must address like communication, trace ability, completeness, consistency, document creation, and managing ch ange. We use first-order logic to define the objects and their attribu tes, and identify the axioms capturing the constraints and relationshi ps among the objects. We show how the axioms can be used in answering the issues raised.