Over the last decade, 4D printing paradigm has received intensive research efforts, whether from researchers in additive manufacturing (AM) or in smart materials (SMs) development. Related research works have thereby generated a large number of ad-hoc solutions with relevant disparate and scattered knowledge. This lack of common core knowledge is mainly due to the multiple involved expertise for fabricating stimulus-reactive structures. The scientific issue of federating and reconciling knowledge is also reinforced especially if such technology must be integrated into the product design process, falling under the field of design for 4D printing. To tackle this challenge, it becomes crucial to formalize and represent knowledge relating AM processes/techniques, SMs behaviours, stimuli and transformation functions with the variety of design objects. In such a context, the paper aims at developing an ontology-based framework for the semantic and logical description of transformable objects in the era of 4D printing for product-process design related purposes. This framework – which is built upon a foundational ontology associated with mereotopology for describing dynamical phenomena called basic formal ontology – consists in introducing a domain ontology equipped with reasoning capabilities supported by description logics for SMs selection and distribution, transformation sequence planning and AM process planning purposes.

在过去的十年中，无论是增材制造（AM）还是智能材料（SM）开发领域的研究人员，4D打印范例都得到了深入的研究。相关的研究工作因此产生了大量的临时性具有相关的分散知识的解决方案。缺乏共同核心知识的主要原因是，制造刺激反应性结构涉及的专业知识很多。联邦和调和知识的科学问题也得到了加强，特别是如果必须将此类技术集成到产品设计过程中（属于4D打印设计领域）的话。为了应对这一挑战，规范和表示与AM流程/技术，SM行为，刺激和转换功能相关的知识以及各种设计对象变得至关重要。在这种情况下，本文旨在开发一种基于本体的框架，用于在4D打印时代实现与产品过程设计相关的可转换对象的语义和逻辑描述。