An ontology-based approach for autonomous systems' description and engineering

Abstract

Ontologies provide a common conceptualisation that can be shared by all stakeholders involved in an engineering development process. They provide a good means to analyse the knowledge domain, allowing to separate the descriptive and the problem-solving knowledge. They can also be as generic as needed allowing its reuse and easy extension. These features made ontologies useful for representing the knowledge of software engineering techniques applied to autonomous systems. This work describes an ontology-based framework consisting of two intertwined elements: a domain ontology for autonomous systems (OASys) to capture any autonomous system's structure, function, and behaviour; and an ontology-based engineering methodology that generates models for autonomous systems, based on the knowledge contained in OASys and other domain ontologies. Both elements have been used in a case study to assess the suitability of the developed framework.