Comparing Ontological Alternatives to Model Engineering Systems and Components

In this paper, we study from an ontological viewpoint some modeling challenges related to the design, realization, and maintenance of engineering systems such as what it means that an assembly complies to a specification and how it persists through time when some of its components are missing or replaced. These challenges intertwine with the missing component and the replacement problems, which are by themselves fundamental from an engineering stance and are thus explicitly addressed in the paper. We describe these topics and for each one we compare different modeling approaches dealing with them, considering also the differences between the three- and four-dimensionalist views. In conclusion, we summarize the comparison of the approaches by highlighting their advantages and shortcomings from an engineering perspective.