Abstract

It is an influential position in engineering design theory that one of the most important steps in conceptual design is the search for working principles. There is, however, no clear statement in the engineering literature about what a working principle is and how knowledge about working principles can be accounted for ontologically. We propose that dispositions are at the core of working principles, and thus that knowledge about working principles is knowledge about dispositions, their material bearers, and their triggers. Building on the engineering design framework developed by Pahl and Beitz, we suggest ontology design patterns for representing knowledge about working principles in a BFO-conformant manner. To represent trigger classes, we introduce the relation has trigger and its inverse trigger of, and discuss their limitations.