This is a sub part of my overall project that explores current practices for reuse of manufacturing experience, RoME where the research is carried out within the DLP-E project in the VINNOVA MERA program. DLP-E aims to improve the Digitally Linked Process and has a focus on Experience reuse, hence the title.

In this course I will focus on the design engineering context, bringing “knowledge at your fingertips” to the engineer. Since my research is about “experience reuse”, especially looking for methods and tools for bringing manufacturing experience back to the earlier phases in product development.

The ability to capture engineering knowledge in a design system opens up new possibilities to make use of experience databases. When feeding a knowledge based design system with experience from databases in the different phases of product development, design rules and decisions executed by the system are based on this experience.

Furthermore, the support for the designer in these systems can be of different types, both automatically executed rules and functions executed in a parametric model, as well as provide the designer the right information at the right time to aid in his decision.

In order to point out a direction and to aid my research in the field, an initial study question is formulated.

Study question: “How can a parametric model support knowledge reuse from the manufacturing area?”

In addition, I have a theory that I would like to investigate, so there is also a hypothesis formulated.

Hypothesis: A parametric model capture engineering knowledge. By utilizing manufacturing experience when building your parametric model, this knowledge is captured in the product model.

Approach: The device is, “Knowledge at your fingertips”. Say you have a feature on your component, a boss. The designer needs to base his design on experience from earlier projects and is also required to follow a Design Practice. Utilizing an inference engine to keep up with design changes.

Since we are going to use the term knowledge through out this project it deserves some explanation.

The definition of knowledge has been argued long before it was used in design engineering, for example characterized by the ancient Greek Plato as “justified true belief”. The meaning of the word “knowledge” is described differently depending on the context where it is used, in Oxfords Advanced Learner’s dictionary [Oxfords Advanced Learner], the term Knowledge is in the form of understanding, “A baby has no knowledge of good and evil” or “I have only limited knowledge of computers”. In MOKA, Methodologies for Knowledge Based Engineering Applications, the term knowledge is briefly described as information in context. In the field of Knowledge Management, knowledge is often put in a hierarchy form of a pyramid where data is based at the bottom and in context becomes information. Then information that is interpreted enables a person to gain knowledge. Adding experience and you have wisdom, and at the top there is sometimes the truth. [Ashok Jashapara], [VIVACE].

Knowledge can then be regarded as tacit knowledge or explicit knowledge, where tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to express, things that you know, but are not shure why. And then there is the explicit knowledge that you are able to communicate with others.

This is the UML component view visualising a Class tree of; an intermediate case, a component module of a jet engine, a Boss wisard class, a attachment wisard class and an RoME application to support re-use of manufacturing expereince.

The attacment application automatically generates the geometry for an attacment that follows the design practice stated by the organisation.

This is a SysML activity model of the attachment application that describes the resources used by the application and the methods used to calculate the parameters that governs the geometry.

Figure that describes the user input done by the user.

The first action “Select a series of bolts” retrievs possible alternatives from a bolt table. The other input values are defined by the user.

Figure that describes the calculations needed to define all parameters for the geometry. Here data from two tables are used, both the bolt table that provides information about bolt geometry as well as a cross reference table that provides additinal data regarding type of insert, hole diameter etc.

Figure of the table in the standard specification of attachments.

Figure of the application for Reuse of Manufacturing Experience.

Interesting references and links in the area.

• README-How to Collaborate on Building KBP.doc
• Table of Context
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5

Thanks for the links! Interested to contribute? — Marcus Sandberg 2008/10/22 14:00

• OMG official resource page for UML
• UML tutorial
• SysML Specifications