An Ontology-Based Representation for Shaping Product Evolution in Regulated Industries

Compliance management is a challenging activity in regulated industries. This is due to the need of navigating rapidly shifting requirements. In the automotive domain products (items) evolve rapidly creating a product line in time in addition to the one in space. The product variability is constrained by legislation, standards, etc. whose applicability may vary depending on the jurisdiction. In this paper, we focus on the legislation and its impact on the product in terms of inclusion/exclusion of product features. We exploit the Semantic Web technologies and we propose an ontology-based representation for managing product variability in compliance with legislation. Specifically, we provide the representation in Resource Description Framework (RDF) and we introduce reusable SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language) constraints to shape the RDF graphs. We illustrate our proposal by considering US and UNECE regulations and their impact on the window lifter.