Functional ontology for conceptual design oriented model representation and reuse

Functionality represents a blueprint of a product and plays a crucial role in problem-solving such as design. This article discusses the model representation from the angle of functional ontology by function deployment. We construct a framework of functional ontology which decomposes the function and contains a library of vocabulary to comprehensively represent the conceptual design model. The ontology enables the automatic identification system to search in the functional space. Furthermore, the functional ontology can form a systematic representation for the model so that it can be reused in the conceptual design and can be applied in the domain of knowledge fusion in our further work.