Abstract

During recent years, manufacturing organizations are facing market changes such as the need for short product life cycles, technological advancement, intense pressure from competitors and the continuous customers’ expectation for high quality products at lower costs. In this scenario, knowledge and its associated engineering/management of every stage involved in the industrial design has become increasingly important for manufacturing companies in order to improve their performance and to take effective decisions. Knowledge based industrial design techniques have been used in the past with fair bit of success but they have their share of limitations like they may be time consuming, costly, domain specific and at times not very intelligent. This paper proposes a novel approach where the set of experience knowledge structure (SOEKS) and decisional DNA (DDNA) techniques are used for the experience based representation of engineering artefacts. The knowledge representation method that we propose; captures and re-uses the product and process involved within an engineering knowledge perspective. We also introduce in this paper a new concept that we call Virtual Engineering Object (VEO), which is a conceptual entity that permits a dual computerized/ real world representation of an engineering entity. It contains the embedment of the decisional model expressed within the set of experience, a geometric representation and the necessary means to relate such virtualization with the physical object being represented. VEO will act as a living representation of the object capable of adding, storing, improving and sharing knowledge through experience, in a way similar to an expert of that area.

Authors (2)