Developing a multi-layer reference design retrieval technology for knowledge management in engineering design

Engineering design is a knowledge-intensive process that encompasses conceptual design, detailed design, engineering analysis, assembly design, process design, and performance evaluation. Each of these tasks involves various areas of knowledge and experience. The sharing of such knowledge and experience is critical to increasing the capacity for developing products and to increasing their quality. It is also critical to reducing the duration and cost of the development cycle. Accordingly, offering engineering designers various methods for retrieving engineering knowledge is one of the most important tasks in managing engineering knowledge. This study develops a multi-layer reference design retrieval technology for engineering knowledge management to provide engineering designers with easy access to relevant design and related knowledge. The tasks per-formed in this research include (i) designing a multi-layer reference design retrieval process, (ii) developing techniques associated with multi-layer reference design retrieval technology, and (iii) implementing a multi-layer reference design retrieval mechanism. The retrieval process contains three main phases-'customer requirement-based reference design retrieval', 'functional requirement-based reference design retrieval' and 'functional feature-based reference design retrieval'. This technology involves (1) customer requirement-based reference design retrieval, which involves a structured query model for customer requirements, a case-based representation of designed entities, a customer requirement-based index structure for historical design cases, and customer requirement-based case searching, matching and ranking mechanisms, (2) functional requirement-based reference design retrieval, which includes a structured query model for functional requirements, a functional requirement-based index structure for historical design cases, and functional requirement-based case searching, matching and ranking mechanisms, and (3) functional feature-based reference design retrieval, which is a binary code-based representation for functional features, an ART1 neural network for functional feature-based case clustering and functional feature-based case ranking. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.