Artifact as species - A formal approach of the evolutionary design

This paper is focused on everyday artifacts (glasses, pens, pots, chairs etc), that is, objects that have functionality and behaviours which can be associated to the form of individual parts and to the relations between the parts themselves. We formalized the notion of artifact as species, where each species is represented by a class of a formal ontology and individuals by instances of such a class. An evolutionary stage is represented by a relation species-subspecies (corresponding to a class-subclass relation of a formal ontology). To each species is associated a population of individuals (represented by instances of classes). In our approach evolution is represented by a revision of species, hence by a revision of classes, and therefore, by an evolution of an ontology.