An ontology-based framework to formalize and represent 4D printing knowledge in design

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2020.103374Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Formalization and representation of 4D printing knowledge for shape/property/functionality changing part design.

  • Development of a domain ontology based on basic formal ontology.

  • Spatiotemporal understanding of transformable parts/objects over time.

Abstract

Over the last decade, 4D printing paradigm has received intensive research efforts, whether from researchers in additive manufacturing (AM) or in smart materials (SMs) development. Related research works have thereby generated a large number of ad-hoc solutions with relevant disparate and scattered knowledge. This lack of common core knowledge is mainly due to the multiple involved expertise for fabricating stimulus-reactive structures. The scientific issue of federating and reconciling knowledge is also reinforced especially if such technology must be integrated into the product design process, falling under the field of design for 4D printing. To tackle this challenge, it becomes crucial to formalize and represent knowledge relating AM processes/techniques, SMs behaviours, stimuli and transformation functions with the variety of design objects. In such a context, the paper aims at developing an ontology-based framework for the semantic and logical description of transformable objects in the era of 4D printing for product-process design related purposes. This framework – which is built upon a foundational ontology associated with mereotopology for describing dynamical phenomena called basic formal ontology – consists in introducing a domain ontology equipped with reasoning capabilities supported by description logics for SMs selection and distribution, transformation sequence planning and AM process planning purposes.

Introduction

Since the beginning of the 1980’s, rapid prototyping – which is also known as three-dimensional (3D) printing or additive manufacturing (AM) – has received growing attention from academia and industry (about 150.000 scientific papers), mostly federating a wide spectrum of scientific domains (André et al., 1984; Rengier et al., 2010; Manfredi et al., 2013). Beyond engineering opportunities and challenges offered by this manufacturing technology, two emerging and interrelated paradigms have been derived, namely 4D printing and bio-printing (André, 2017). Both technologies aim at integrating transformation capabilities into manufactured parts. By relating AM techniques and smart materials (SMs), 4D printing can play a crucial role for fabricating transformable, deployable and adaptive structures that carry out a predictable shift (Ge et al., 2013; Tibbits, 2014). This challenging association provides a temporal dimension in which transformation is triggered via stimuli. The development of 4D printing applications therefore requires taking advantages of AM techniques capacity and also multi-material printing ability (Vaezi et al., 2013; Gibson et al., 2015; Momeni et al., 2017). With both capabilities, parts are henceforth designed and manufactured as alive objects able to shift into different physical states or geometric configurations with respect to its trigger conditions (Choi et al., 2015). Indeed, stimuli are required to activate changes at different levels such as structure, shape, properties and functionalities. For all the above reasons, 4D printing is seen as a promising manufacturing technology and a booming cross-disciplinary research field to deliver next generation of alive products (Tibbits, 2014; André, 2017; Kuang et al., 2019). To achieve this objective, the related multi-perspective knowledge needs to be formalized and represented in order to be properly reused in the product development phases.

Over the last decades, efforts have been made towards integrating a wide range of manufacturing technologies as well as lifecycle purposes in product design. As such, several methods and tools falling under the concept of design for X (DFX) (Holt and Barnes, 2010) have been proposed. DFX aims to concurrently consider lifecycle purposes like assembly, manufacturing, recycling, etc. and product design, therefore delivering lifecycle friendly designed definitions. In a similar way and to ensure the full adoption of 4D printing in industry and academia, it becomes vital to address design for 4D printing issues in terms of elaborating knowledge models, methods and tools. The above rationale is emphasized by current 4D printing practices and related proof-of-concepts showing scattered and disparate knowledge due to the multiple involved expertise.

In such a context, the main research objective is to formalize and represent 4D printing knowledge related to AM processes and techniques, SMs, stimuli and transformation issues. Such critical knowledge requires to be properly described and computer interpretable in order to be reused along the product design stages. In other words, by following such an objective, product architects and designers will be aided to make right decisions during the design process of alive and transformable objects. To do so, an ontology-based framework is proposed to ensure the semantic and logical description of transformable objects in the era of 4D printing.

The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 addresses relevant research works in the fields of 4D printing and ontology models for design with a special emphasis on product, process and material, on which motivation is highlighted. Section 3 establishes the ontological framework with the underlying philosophical/epistemic, scientific hypotheses and the support of the basic formal ontology (BFO) (Arp et al., 2015), along with the use of 4D printing knowledge in design. Built on this, Section 4 presents the proposed ontology for formalizing and representing 4D printing knowledge. The proposed ontology embeds reasoning capabilities supported by mereotopological relationships and description logics for further design for 4D printing purpose. Two case studies are introduced in the last section to illustrate the relevance of the proposed knowledge base.

Section snippets

Literature review

This section gives an overview on the significant published research works on 4D printing and ontology models for design. It also highlights current challenges in these fields to be tackled in the specific context of the paper.

Ontology construction and utilization framework

The formalization and representation of 4D printing knowledge for design related purposes requires beforehand a dedicated framework built upon foundational hypotheses and theories. The objectives of such an ontological framework are then twofold: (i) providing a domain ontology construction strategy and (ii) clarifying the ontology usage scenarios.

Since the investigated knowledge domain highlights objects transformation over time, it seems convenient to address three-dimensionalism (Hales &

HERMES ontology development

With respect to the aforementioned framework, this section presents the HERMES ontology development. For the sake of clarity, a labelling convention has been adopted as follows: the names of classes are written in capitalised/lower case (i.e. My_part), the names of attributes and relationships use mixed Case notation (i.e. isParentOf) while names of instances are in italics (i.e. Part_1).

Illustrative cases

To demonstrate the applicability of the developed HERMES ontology, an implementation has been made in Protégé software and two use cases are introduced. The consistency of the ontology is checked by using HermiT reasoner and DL rules for classes restrictions have been set up. It is about describing the folding function realised by an origami cube case from Ge et al. (2014) and also a multi-bending actuator similar to the case presented in Westbrook and Qi (2008), therefore showing 2D-to-3D and

Discussions

The proposed research work has highlighted the usefulness of an ontology to federate the scattered knowledge related to the emerging 4D printing technology. It therefore represents a pioneer effort towards knowledge formalisation and representation for multiple purposes (as introduced in Fig. 2). As far as HERMES ontology is established, two case studies have been set up to show its applicability from different design points of view. Besides to the limitation of the knowledge domain to

Conclusion and future work

The paper underlines a pioneer effort dedicated to the formalisation and representation of 4D printing knowledge relating AM processes and techniques, SMs, stimuli and transformation issues to design and engineering objects. To do so, an ontological framework has been beforehand established with the underlying philosophical and scientific hypotheses, along with the use of 4D printing knowledge in design. This has led to the construction of the HERMES ontology around several views (aligned with

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Saoussen Dimassi: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Writing - original draft. Frédéric Demoly: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Christophe Cruz: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - review & editing. H. Jerry Qi: Writing - review & editing. Kyoung-Yun Kim: Writing - review & editing. Jean-Claude André: Writing - review & editing. Samuel Gomes: Supervision.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.

Acknowledgements

This research activity is part of a much larger project in the field of design for 4D printing. The authors would like to thank the French Ministère de l'Enseignement Supérieure et de la Recherche, the French “Investissements d'Avenir” program, project ISITE-BFC (contract ANR-15-IDEX-0003) as main financial support of this research program, and S.mart Franche-Comté network for their participation.

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