Abstract not found

Information technology has played an increasingly important role in engineering product development. Its influence over the past decade has been accelerating and its impact in the coming decade will undoubtedly be immense. This paper surveys several research areas relating to knowledge representation, capture and retrieval, which will have a growing influence on product development. Each of these areas could, on its own, provide sufficient material for an entire survey paper. Unlike traditional survey papers, this paper does not attempt to provide a comprehensive review of a field of research from its inception to the present. Rather, this paper aims to touch on a representative selection of recent developments in these influential technical areas. The paper provides perspectives into the kinds of technologies that are emerging from rapidly expanding fields of research, and discusses challenges that must be overcome to enable transition of these technologies into industry practice to support the next generation of product development software tools.

Engineering product development in today's industry is becoming increasingly knowledge intensive. The NIST Design Repository Project, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is working to develop infrastructural technologies to support the use of design repositories in industry. In contrast to traditional design databases, design repositories more actively support knowledge-based design, serving not only as archives, but as repositories of heterogeneous information that are designed to enable representation, capture, sharing, and reuse of corporate design knowledge. This paper presents a language that has been developed for the modeling of engineering design artifacts. The implementation of a prototype tool suite, which includes intelligent web-based interfaces that allow distributed users to create, edit and browse design repositories, is also presented.

This paper describes the design and development of a design repository software system. This system is a prototype implementation intended to demonstrate the role of design repositories as part of a vision for the next generation of product development software systems. This research involves not only the creation of a prototype software system, but is part of a broader effort that also includes the development of a core product knowledge representation, and that seeks to address terminological and semantic issues associated with computeraided product development. This paper focuses on the interfaces that have been developed to support authoring and navigation of the product models stored in design repositories, as well as the software architecture and associated rationale that provide the framework on which the system is built.

Nowadays, computer-aided tools have enabled the creation of electronic design documents on an unprecedented scale, while determining and finding what can be reused for a new design is like searching for a “needle in a haystack. ” For example, as reported by Marsh [1], there are approximately 40,000 documents produced in the design of a single engine in an aerospace

Complexity in modern product design is manifest through large numbers of diverse parts, functions, and design disciplines that require an intricate web of synergistic relationships to link them together. It is extremely difficult for designers to assimilate or represent such complex designs in their totality. In this research, we present a framework that utilizes the intricate relationships between design components to enhance the representational power of design models and to provide focal points for automating the management of design complexity. We introduce automated mechanisms, based on aggregation and interaction relationships between design components, that integrate model structure, a variety of conceptual and detailed design information, and product management controls into a single modeling framework. These mechanisms are easily incorporated into design models and they facilitate re-use and cooperative design by ensuring that related entities can be modified independently. I...

Complexity in modern product design is manifest through large numbers of diverse parts, functions, and design disciplines that require an intricate web of synergistic relationships to link them together. It is extremely difficult for designers to assimilate or represent such complex designs in their totality. Few CAD tools provide support for managing complex design relationships. Instead, designers must document and track these relationships independent of the design model. This increases the burden on the design team and increases the risk of inconsistencies and errors in the design. This researches introduces a framework that utilizes the intricate relationships between design components to enhance the representational power of design models and to provide focal points for automating the management of design complexity. Automated mechanisms, based on aggregation, interaction, and variational relationships between design components, are presented that integrate model structure, a v...

As part of the DARPA Rapid Design Exploration and Optimization (RaDEO) program, Boeing, Philadelphia, is involved in an on-going concurrent design engineering research project called MADEsmart which seeks to partially automate the Integrated Product Team (IPT) concept used by Boeing for organizing the design engineering process, with the aid of intelligent agent technology. Although currently only in an early stage of development, the project is expected to crucially employ a constraint-centered System Design Management Agent developed by the University of Toronto's IE Department in conjunction with Boeing. The SDMA will use the constraint-based Toronto Ontologies for a Virtual Enterprise (TOVE) ontologies, and its domain theories for design engineering and dependent underlying theories, phrased as KIF/Ontolingua assertions in an axiomatic system running in the constraint logic system ECLiPSe, as its primary knowledge resource to monitor an ongoing design project, offering resource-all...

This paper discusses a case-study for investigating the loss of design information in collaborative design projects. The case-study was conducted with senior mechanical engineering students at Clemson University working collaboratively on a semester long Senior Design Capstone project. The case study findings indicate that there is a potential loss of design information in collaborative groups. The design information, if archived systematically, can help future designers to review the past design and build upon the existing ideas to come with better or new solutions. .Corresponding Author: Joshua D. Summers, jsummer@clemson.edu Motivation for Investigating Information Loss Engineering design problems and projects are increasingly becoming more complex with the advancement of technology and rising global economy. Thus, design of complex engineering systems is increasingly becoming a collaborative task 1 . In most cases, designers and the design teams are not located in same organization but collaborate from different organizations or even different parts of the world 2 . The type of data exchanged by the modern day designers includes Computer Aided Design (CAD) models, general knowledge about the design and design process, including design specifications, design rules, constraints, and design rationale 1 . In most collaborative design projects the information that is generated during the design process is not archived in a formalized manner that can be made available to all for current or future use 3 . There is, therefore, a potential loss of valuable information. This information includes not only the CAD drawings generated during the design process but includes everything from the requirements list to the design rationale that went into revising and modifying the design before it took its final form. This information, if archived in a formalized manner, could be of potential use for future projects and could prevent "reinventing the wheel" 4 . This issue is the motivation for investigating information loss.

Industry recognizes the central importance of managing and sharing CAD data within the organization, and powerful Product Data Management (PDM) systems have been developed to address this need However, engineering schools have been slow to adopt PDM technology, and student design teams typically rely on a variety of ad hoc approaches to manage shared CAD data. To address the PDM requirements of student projects, the University of Western Ontario acquired and deployed PDMWorks in January 2006. PDMWorks is a midrange PDM system for SolidWorks. Installation and administration of this midrange product are very straightforward, and its tight integration with SolidWorks makes PDMWorks easy to use. However, PDMWorks is best suited to relatively small workgroups, and does not scale easily to large numbers of users.