Automated business rules and requirements to enrich product-centric information
Résumé
Current PLM or BIM based information systems suffer from a lack of checking components for business rules. One reason is the misunderstanding of the role and nature of business rules, and how they should be treated in a product-centric information system. This paper intends to provide both a process and a related model to build such a component and enrich future systems. Rules and requirements process management enables the unambiguous formalization of implicit knowledge contained in business rules, generally expressed in easily understandable language, and leads to the formal expression of requirements. In this paper, the requirements are considered a consequence of the application of a business rule. A conceptual model is then introduced, called DALTON (DAta Linked Through Occurrences Network), which supports this process. In this ontology, concepts and product data, coming for instance from an existing product database, are represented using instances and occurrences, connected together with triples built from business rules and requirements according to previous management processes. An experiment involving a set of SWRL rules is conducted in the Protégé environment that validates the model and the process.