Steps Towards a Formal Ontology for Enginnering function of technical artifacs

The two general approaches in engineering design to capture functions of technical artifacts are the Functional Representation ap- proach, dened by Chandrasekaran and Josephson, and the Functional Basis approach, set forward by Stone and Wood. In the rst approach engineers relate functions of artifacts to behaviors of artifacts, and then relate these behaviors to structural-physical descriptions of the artifacts; in the second approach engineers model functions of artifacts in terms of inputs and outputs, and then relate these functions directly to structural- physical descriptions of artifacts. In this paper we give an ontological analysis of the two approaches of function, with a formalization in the dolce ontology