In order to fulfill a myriad of ever changing customer requirements on product variety, mass customization had become a economically viable model that enables manufacturing firm to offer attractive product variants while keeping the manufacturing cost relatively low. One of the ways in realizing mass customization is by designing and developing product family. In the product family perspective, the understanding of product family metrics and modeling is important for decision analysis and support. Most of the current studies for decision support in product family design have different product family modeling approaches that support certain decision making task in product family design. An integrated knowledge framework that is able to support decision making in all aspects of interest would be highly desirable. This paper presents a conceptual framework of ontology based decision support in product family design. The framework illustrates the potential of ontology in assisting the decision making process in product family design by presenting four types of ontology oriented comparison: product structure oriented comparison, manufacturing process oriented comparison, cost and profit oriented comparison and green manufacturing oriented comparison. An example of a product family of digital camera is presented to illustrate the product family concepts and to demostrate the concepts in the proposed framework.
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