On technology for functional requirement-based reference design retrieval in engineering knowledge management

Engineering design is a knowledge-intensive process, and includes conceptual design, detailed design, engineering analysis, assembly design, process design, and performance evaluation. Each of these tasks involves various aspects of technical knowledge and experience. Whether this technical knowledge and experience can be effectively shared is key to increasing product development capability and quality, and also to reducing the duration and cost of the development cycle. Consequently, providing engineering designers various query methods for retrieving engineering knowledge is one of the most important tasks in engineering knowledge management.The study develops a technology for functional requirement-based reference design retrieval as a decision support mechanism, which can assist engineering designers to retrieve relevant design and associated knowledge for reference in conducting functional requirements of a product. This study involves the following tasks: (i) designing a functional requirement-based reference design retrieval process, (ii) developing techniques related to the technology for functional requirement-based reference design retrieval, and (iii) implementing a functional requirement-based reference design retrieval mechanism. The retrieval process includes the steps of functional requirement-based query, case searching and matching, and case ranking. The technology involves (i) a structured query model for functional requirements, (ii) an index structures for historical design cases, (iii) functional requirement-based case searching and matching mechanisms, (iv) a functional requirement-based case ranking mechanism, and (v) a case-based representation of designed entities. Finally, the experimental example with indexing and retrieving similar designed entities is conducted to demonstrate the proposed techniques worked efficiently.     

Electronic word of mouth analysis for service experience

Since eWOM provides a rich source of objective information about products or services, it has become one of the major ways in which consumers collect information about items they are interested in buying. However, the problem of eWOM overload makes it difficult to effectively collect this information, and may have adverse effects on their actual purchase behavior. eWOM content is characterized by unstructured text formats, oversimplified expressions, and newly coined phrases (textspeak), and these all contribute to the challenges that arise when analyzing eWOM. This study thus proposes an eWOM analysis method for analyzing eWOM, which may lead to a more effective method for analyzing eWOM content, extracting both positive and negative appraisals, and help consumers in their decision making. At the same time, the method proposed in this study can also be utilized as a tool to assist companies in better understanding product or service appraisals, thus translating these opinions into business intelligence and as the basis for product/service improvements.     

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 performed 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.     

Development of technology for customer requirement-based reference design retrieval

Engineering design is a knowledge-intensive process, and includes conceptual design, detailed design, engineering analysis, assembly design, process design, and performance evaluation. Each task involves various aspects of knowledge and experience. Whether this knowledge and experience can be effectively shared is key to increasing product development capability and quality, and also to reducing the duration and cost of the development cycle. Therefore, offering engineering designers various query methods for retrieving engineering knowledge is one of the most important tasks in engineering knowledge management.The study develops a technology for customer requirement-based reference design retrieval to provide engineering designers with easy access to relevant design and associated knowledge. The tasks involved in this research include (i) designing a customer requirement-based reference design retrieval process, (ii) developing techniques related to the technology for customer requirement-based reference design retrieval, and (iii) implementing a customer requirement-based reference design retrieval mechanism. The retrieval process comprises the steps of customer requirement-based query, case searching and matching, and case ranking. The technology involves (1) a structured query model for customer requirement, (2) an index structure for historical design cases, (3) customer requirement-based case searching and matching mechanisms, (4) a customer requirement-based case ranking mechanism, and (5) a case-based representation of designed entities.     

Image completion using prediction concept via support vector regression

Image completion is a widely used method for automatically removing objects or repairing the damaged portions of an image. However, information of the original image is often lacking in reconstructed structures; therefore, images with complex structures are difficult to restore. This study proposes a prediction-oriented image completion mechanism (PICM), which applies the prediction concept to image completion using numerous techniques and methods. The experiment results indicate that under normal circumstances, our PICM not only produces good inpainting quality but it is also easy to use.     

WALL HEAT CONDUCTION EFFECT ON NATURAL CONVECTION IN AN ENCLOSURE FILLED WITH A NON-DARCIAN POROUS MEDIUM

ABSTRACT

A numerical analysis has been made of the conjugate natural convection in a rectangular enclosure filled with a fluid-saturated porous medium and surrounded with four solid walls. The conductance of the walls is assumed to be much greater than that of the cavity filled with a porous medium. The main objective was to investigate the influences of the ratio of thermal conductivity of the wall to that of the fluid-porous matrix composite, the Darcy-modified Rayleigh number, the Prandtl number, and the aspect ratio. The streamlines and isotherms are presented; also, the local and average Nusselt numbers are presented along the interface between walls and cavity. A non-Darcian model was employed and the numerical method was SIMPLE-C. The numerical results indicate that the wall heat conduction effects decrease the heat transfer rate. When the wall heat conduction is considered, the greater the conductance of the solid walls surrounding the cavity, the greater is the rate of heat transfer.     

Soret Effects on Non-Fourier Heat and Non-Fickian Mass Diffusion Transfer in a Slab

In this article, non-Fickian and non-Fourier models were used for the rapid heat and mass transfer problem in a slab. The boundaries are convective and insulated sides, and the solution takes the Soret effect into consideration. The Laplace transform method is used to obtain a local-analytic solution in the transformed domain and then inverted to obtain the results in physical quantities. The results show that the temperature and concentration curves possess discontinuities when the relaxation-time in the non-Fourier heat conduction and non-Fickian mass diffusion problem is considered. These discontinuities are caused by wave propagation. Propagated waves are reflected at the insulated side and grow weaker as time passes. When considering the Soret effect for mass transfer, the intensity of concentration rise in the discontinuities will increase.     

Development of a semantic-based content mapping mechanism for information retrieval

Most information retrieval systems use keywords entered by the user as the search criteria to find documents. However, the language used in documents is often complicated and ambiguous, and thus the results obtained by using keywords are often inaccurate. To address this problem, this study developed a semantic-based content mapping mechanism for an information retrieval system. This approach employs the semantic features and ontological structure of the content as the basis for constructing a content map, thus simplifying the search process and improving the accuracy of the returned results.     

Development of a mechanism for ontology-based product lifecycle knowledge integration

Compared with relying on the efforts of various enterprises collaborating on product lifecycle activities, such as coordination, communication and control, the ability to effectively share product information and knowledge is more important. Therefore, how to best integrate such heterogeneous product knowledge distributed among various cooperating enterprises has become an extremely important knowledge management subjects associated with collaborative product lifecycle.This study develops a novel mechanism for integrating ontology-based product lifecycle knowledge to effectively integrate the heterogeneous product knowledge distributed among different enterprises during a product’s lifecycle, thereby facilitating sharing of this product knowledge. This study: (i) designed an integration and sharing process for collaborative product lifecycle knowledge, (ii) developed techniques associated with integration of ontology-based product lifecycle knowledge, and (iii) implemented an integration and sharing mechanism for ontology-based product lifecycle knowledge. In developing techniques associated with integration of ontology-based product lifecycle knowledge, which involves establishing a product lifecycle ontology, designing local ontology schema, designing an integration algorithm for ontology-based product lifecycle knowledge, and designing a searching method for ontology-based product lifecycle knowledge.