Special Issue on Collaborative Engineering (original) (raw)

New Technologies and Standards for Design Knowledge Management in Collaborative Conceptual Design

Current working methods and techniques in collaborative, distributed and knowledge intensive engineering design environment have a number of problems. Applications and techniques for m anaging the knowledge within the lifecycle are either too inflexible, and so remain unused, or completely uncoordinated resulting in the use of incoherent documents and filling systems to store information in an ad-hoc manner. This ongoing project, working with industrial partners, aims to provide a middle-ground application and methodology to enable users to define their ontologies from building blocks of Resource Description Framework schema based components. This project also includes the use of STEP Application Protocol-224 models within the knowledge base to define the feature and geometry of the designed component and aims to integrate the process element using XML Process Description Language into the knowledge base in the future.

A design representation scheme for collaborative product development

The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 2005

Design is an integral component of product development, which includes manufacturing. In order to avoid costly reworks and delays, and to reduce the leadtime in product development, effective communication of design concepts among the various stakeholders such as customers, designers and engineers is of utmost importance. In this respect, functional representations provide a methodology, which can be used to describe a design or product effectively. However, function is not the only type of information that needs to be communicated among the various stakeholders during a design process. Other types of information such as design specifications and constraints, which are non-functional, also need to be taken into account. This non-functional information cannot be adequately expressed using existing functional representations. Accordingly, in this work, a novel purpose-behaviour-structure (PBS) representation scheme to capture vital design knowledge for collaborative product development is proposed. The proposed PBS representation scheme can be used by designers working in a collaborative environment for product development. A case study on the design of a vacuum cleaner is used to illustrate the functionality of the PBS representation scheme. The details of the representation scheme are presented in this paper.

On the Management of Sharing Design Knowledge

This paper presents the approach and results of a research project that develops an environment for sharing design knowledge. The project implements a design modelling approach that allows designers to capture design concepts into formally defined typologies. With these, designers can build flexible design models and have full control over definitions and structures used to represent design concepts. The presented research project uses this dynamic modelling approach in the development of Design Knowledge Servers that function in a network to provide a distributed multi-user environment for sharing design knowledge. Such a network serves the requirements of collaborative design and is useful for other purposes, such as publication of formalised product datasheets. The paper briefly provides the background of the knowledge modelling approach underlying this project and describes the design and implementation issues of the Design Knowledge Servers and the services they provide.

The evolution, challenges, and future of knowledge representation in product design systems

Computer-Aided Design, 2013

Product design is a highly involved, often ill-defined, complex and iterative process, and the needs and specifications of the required artifact get more refined only as the design process moves toward its goal. An effective computer support tool that helps the designer make better-informed decisions requires efficient knowledge representation schemes. In today's world, there is a virtual explosion in the amount of raw data available to the designer, and knowledge representation is critical in order to sift through this data and make sense of it. In addition, the need to stay competitive has shrunk product development time through the use of simultaneous and collaborative design processes, which depend on effective transfer of knowledge between teams. Finally, the awareness that decisions made early in the design process have a higher impact in terms of energy, cost, and sustainability, has resulted in the need to project knowledge typically required in the later stages of design to the earlier stages. Research in design rationale systems, product families, systems engineering, and ontology engineering has sought to capture knowledge from earlier product design decisions, from the breakdown of product functions and associated physical features, and from customer requirements and feedback reports. VR (Virtual reality) systems and multidisciplinary modeling have enabled the simulation of scenarios in the manufacture, assembly, and use of the product. This has helped capture vital knowledge from these stages of the product life and use it in design validation and testing. While there have been considerable and significant developments in knowledge capture and representation in product design, it is useful to sometimes review our position in the area, study the evolution of research in product design, and from past and current trends, try and foresee future developments. The goal of this paper is thus to review both our understanding of the field and the support tools that exist for the purpose, and identify the trends and possible directions research can evolve in the future.

A Web-Based Environment for Documentation and Sharing of Engineering Design Knowledge

Volume 3: 28th Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Parts A and B, 2008

This paper presents the foundation for a collaborative Webbased environment for improving communication by formally defining a platform for documentation and sharing of engineering design knowledge throughout the entire design process. In this work an ontological structure is utilized to concisely define a set of individual engineering concepts. This set of modular ontologies link together to create a flexible, yet consistent, product development knowledge-base. The resulting infrastructure uniquely enables the information stored within the knowledge-base to be readily inspectable and computable, thus allowing for design tools that reason on the information to assist designers and automate design processes. A case study of the structural optimization of a transfer plate for an aerospace circuit breaker is presented to demonstrate implementation and usefulness of the knowledge framework.

Capturing an integrated design information space with a diagram-based approach

Journal of Engineering Design, 2013

The Decision Rationale editor (DRed), an IBIS derivative, originally developed to support the capture of design rationale has progressively evolved into a tool to map an integrated information space covering product planning, specification, design, and service. This article presents the research undertaken to enable this evolution and to test the application of the tool in industry. The work consisted of extending the notation and the functionality of the DRed tool in the service of new methods for information representation and developing a new approach to designing and its documentation by integrated diagrams. Thus far the approach has been taught for two years and a half to engineering graduates involved in the training programme of the collaborating company. The application of the approach to an aerospace engineering design task is illustrated through a case study. The results of the evaluation have shown that creating large digital information spaces is feasible and delivers benefits to users.

Knowledge sharing and reuse for engineering design integration

Expert Systems with Applications, 1998

Completion of complex engineering designs (e.g. the design of offshore oil platforms, ships, etc.) often involves a number of agents who have to share or reuse design models within a distributed environment. This paper presents a knowledge sharing workbench which enables agents to share common domain knowledge, based on the problems which emerge in the design process. The workbench includes Application Programming Interfaces provided by expert system shells, an Object Request Broker, and a number of ontologies to facilitate the construction of new knowledge-based systems. In addition, the distributed knowledge acquisition tools generated by the workbench can maintain model consistency between agents when specification changes occur in any of the agents. A case study from the petrochemical industry is used to illustrate the use of workbench for the integration of a number of agents. This case study demonstrates that a process flow knowledge model in an offshore petrochemical plant, designed for operational purposes (e.g. fault diagnosis), can be reused to form part of a new knowledge-based system which generates the data for plant layout design. ᭧

Ontology-based assembly design and information sharing for collaborative product development

Computer-Aided Design, 2006

To realize a truly collaborative product design and development process, effective communication among design collaborators is a must. In other words, the design intent that is imposed in a product design should be seized and interpreted properly; heterogeneous modeling terms should be semantically processed both by design collaborators and intelligent systems. Ontologies in the Semantic Web can explicitly represent semantics and promote integrated and consistent access to data and services. Thus, if an ontology is used in a heterogeneous and distributed design collaboration, it will explicitly and persistently represent engineering relations that are imposed in an assembly design. Design intent can be captured by reasoning, and, in turn, as reasoned facts, it can be propagated and shared with design collaborators. This paper presents a new paradigm of ontology-based assembly design. In the framework, an assembly design (AsD) ontology serves as a formal, explicit specification of assembly design so that it makes assembly knowledge both machine-interpretable and to be shared. An Assembly Relation Model (ARM) is enhanced using ontologies that represent engineering, spatial, assembly, and joining relations of assembly in a way that promotes collaborative assembly information-sharing environments. In the developed AsD ontology, implicit AsD constraints are explicitly represented using OWL (Web Ontology Language) and SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language). This paper shows that the ability of the AsD ontology to be reasoned can capture both assembly and joining intents by a demonstration with a realistic mechanical assembly. Finally, this paper presents a new assembly design information-sharing framework and an assembly design browser for a collaborative product development.

A Framework for Capturing and Applying Design Knowledge in Complex Systems

Advances in Transdisciplinary Engineering, 2016

The large amount of available design information from different areas has become common in most organizations. Under these conditions, there are difficulties in sharing and reusing knowledge, especially by the fact that this knowledge is available within the company in different formats and locations. Due to this, design engineers often fail to use such information. To ensure a better use, it is important to organize and integrate the available knowledge in a collaborative manner. In this context, the Knowledge-based Engineering (KBE) approach can be associated. Through KBE concepts, the current study aims to develop a set of tools for assisting decision making, by storing and providing useful information in a timely manner. Such solution should meet the needs of its users (i.e. designers), as well as improve the quality of design activities along the Product Development Process (PDP). For this study, still under development, the following steps have been adopted: (a) delimitation of action scope (i.e. steps of PDP to be focused); (b) knowledge capture; (c) knowledge structuring through ontologies; (d) standardization; (e) development of rules; (f) creation of application solutions; and (g) performance evaluation of solutions. The application of the present proposal is expected to facilitate the access to information, significantly reduce the number of Engineering Change Requests (ECR's), as well as allow acquired knowledge to be used in subsequent projects (e.g. lessons learned).