An immune designed ontology to specify requirements and recommend layout solutions

Although layout problems have been widely investigated in literature, little attention has been given to expression and collection of needs, elicitation of specifications and requirements engineering, which are important activities that condition problem formalization, and selection of suitable resolution algorithms. We suggest a knowledge based approach to specify requirements and recommend design choices to arrange material handling systems and machines on a shop floor. We adopt biological immunity as a methodological guideline to design and develop an ontology to help decision makers express their needs, and to assist system designers with the specification of requirements and further determination of design choices. We show that the developed ontology is a user-friendly decision support tool that allows specifying requirements and recommending suitable material handling systems and resolution algorithms in a semi-formal language that relieves decision makers from the complexities of mathematical formalizations.