Formation and development of ontology of designing as a scientific discipline: a brief history of personal experience

The article attempts to present the author's view on the history of the formation and development of a scientific discipline, referred to as the ontology of designing. The presented material summarizes the work carried out by the author over the past ten years. The author as the founder and executive editor of the journal of the same name with as the discipline under consideration uses the articles published in it and the materials of his works presented at various international conferences, in other specialized journals and published monographs. Despite the fact that the analysis of the formation of the discipline is largely based on the author's own personal experience and is viewed through the prism of this experience, nevertheless, the basis of this formed discipline is the numerous works of its predecessors, ranging from the architects of ancient Greece, mathematicians and engineers of the Middle Ages, and ending with modern works in the field of artificial intelligence and information technology. The author shares a brief personal background of the formation of his own understanding of the ontology of designing, paying tribute to his first scientific advisor V.G. Maslov, who fostered in him a systematic approach to optimizing complex systems, paying particular attention to design uncertainty. Work experience on the creation of computer-aided design systems for the engine, and later for the aircraft as a whole in cooperation with industry, teaching the disciplines on the design of technical systems, general design theory, information systems, databases, ontology of designing and production ontology allowed the author to develop a scientific basis for a new discipline, determine its boundaries and a place in the existing scientific space, develop a range of key terms, form the very concept of ontology of designing. The article provides examples of the implementation of the concept of ontology of designing in various subject areas, in particular, when creating a robot designer at the stage of preliminary design of an aircraft, when forming a model of a future university, in the tasks of production planning, development of electronic manuals, design of scientific journals and other organizational and technical systems.