by U. S. Department of Comemrce (Author)
Supporting different stakeholder viewpoints across the product's entire lifecycle requires semantic richness for representing product related information. This paper proposes a multi-layered product modeling framework that enables stakeholders to define their product-specific models and relate them to physical or simulated instances. The framework is defined within the Model-driven Architecture and adapted to the multi-layer approach of the architecture. The data layer represents real world products, the model layer includes models of those products, and the meta-model layer (M2) defines the product modeling language. The semantic-based product modeling language described in this paper is specialized from a web ontology language enabling product designers to express the semantics of their product models explicitly and logically in an engineering-friendly way. The interactions between these three layers are described to illustrate how each layer in the framework is used in a product engineering context. A product example is provided for further understanding of the framework.