Ontological multi-view failure modeling for IPPD

Reliability engineering includes series of failure focused technology and management activities running throughout the entire product development cycle. Only these activities are effectively integrated and numerous relevant failure data is synthetically applied, the intent for progressively identifying failure and continuously improving reliability can be obtained. In current engineering practice, the reliability data and knowledge produced in different development phases cannot be efficiently shared and reused. There still exist difficulties in interoperating between different reliability activities. This paper establishes the failure ontology models that contain global failure ontology model, functional failure ontology model and hardware failure ontology model. In virtue of this ontology model, the reliability activities are seamlessly integrated into the integrated product and process development (IPPD). In this model, the evolution process of failure cognition during each development phases is considered. Base on this ontology model, a reliability engineering environment is constructed with the support of PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) platform to verify the ontology model's correctness and applicability.