ABSTRACT
An automotive troubleshooting is planned and created using ready-made skills, components and tools from multiple suppliers, e.g. motor company, material supplier, and appliance supplier. Hence, the technicians at repair shop want to locate suppliers easily and effectively evaluate the complementary elements. In addition, because a number of recent developments in information technology have opened up a vast potential for new electronic forms of procurement, users have the possibility for searching for up-to-date data all over the world and for selecting the most favorable offer. Previous research effort focused mainly on the actual configuration process for solving product configuration problems, such as the rule-based approach (Li et al., 2009) and the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) approach (Wang et al., 2009; Yuan et al., 2009). Besides, attention has been directed toward the study of conceptual modeling of customizable products, namely product configuration models (Wang et al., 2009). Product configuration systems are able to deal with the problems of configuring complex products under mass customization. Meanwhile, the reusability of configuration models can effectively reduce the time of developing product information systems. Ontology, which is defined as the conceptualization of terms and relations in a domain, provides a means to structurally represent and reuse domain knowledge. As an explicit specification of a conceptualization, ontology plays a significant role in these aspects: sharing information, integrating different applications, implementing interoperability and reusing knowledge.
