Knowledge integration and sharing for collaborative molding product design and process development

This study presents a systematic approach to developing a knowledge integration and sharing mechanism for collaborative molding product design and process development. The proposed approach includes the steps of (i) collaborative molding product design and process development process modeling, (ii) an ontology-based knowledge model establishment, (iii) knowledge integration and sharing system framework design, (iv) ontology-based knowledge integration and sharing methods development, and (v) ontology-based knowledge integration and sharing mechanism implementation. The mechanism can support collaborative molding product design and process development by providing functions of knowledge integration and sharing. Results of this study facilitate the knowledge integration and sharing of collaborative molding product design and process development to satisfy the product knowledge demands of participants, and thus increase molding product development capability, reduce molding product development cycle time and cost, and ultimately increase molding product marketability.     

Traceability and management of dispersed product knowledge during design and manufacturing

Product development processes comprise highly creative and knowledge-intensive tasks that involve extensive information exchange and communication among geographically distributed teams. Due to the geographical and institutional separation between the different systems involved in the product lifecycle, product knowledge sharing is becoming a key issue in the information systems of extended enterprises. This paper addresses the issue and challenges of product knowledge traceability during the product development. The aim of this research effort is to enhance the sharing and use of product knowledge acquired during the development process using traceability information.A standardized approach is proposed to trace and share product knowledge and key constructs to support traceability during the product development process are identified and formalized. This research effort is based on the premise that an important step towards achieving product knowledge sharing is providing traceability across various product knowledge elements that are used in product development phases, i.e. design and manufacturing. Two disjointed but complementary case studies illustrating the benefit of traceability are presented. The potential role of traceability is described, first to support the decision making process during engineering change management (ECM), and second to support product-oriented modelling for knowledge sharing and exchanging to meet the quality requirements. The proposed approach has been implemented using the MEGA Suite tool and applied to each of the case studies and could be integrated to PLM systems currently in use.     

Emergent standard of knowledge management: Hybrid peer-to-peer knowledge management

Knowledge has been a critical resource for supporting business strategies. The major obstacle to classical knowledge management approach is that knowledge workers hesitate to release their own control and give up sharing autonomy. The peer-to-peer architecture facilitates achieving autonomy and self-organized management. However, there are still some problems, such as computational efficiency, organizational memory accumulation. This study proposes a hybrid peer-to-peer architecture to consider the tradeoff between centralized and decentralized knowledge management. The proposed architecture preserves the autonomy of knowledge workers as well as allows the accumulation of organizational memory. It also encourages workers to issue on-line discussions to add knowledge annotations. Under this architecture, a scenario of collaborative product design is described.     

Creating a specific domain ontology for supporting R&D in the science-based sector – The case of biosensors

In science-based and technology-intensive projects, knowledge management challenges require a tentative and cautious review of the technological domains, as well as, venues to monitor and assess the way those domains evolve, emerge, mature, and decline. Ontologies play a crucial role in conceptualizing/formalizing domain knowledge, yet any ontological platform that is constructed for supporting R&D throughout the knowledge creation process, must explicitly address the interplay between exploitation and exploration of knowledge at deep and surface levels. Focusing on the product per se and its downstream and upstream knowledge evolution complex system, ontology engineering adopts herein a process-driven view for capturing a continuously changing environment. The authors present a methodological framework for creating specific domain ontologies by means of a cybernetic infrastructure built on a modification of the Nonaka’s SECI process. This rationale is exemplified on biosensors, a class of devices strongly attached to multidisciplinary basic and applied science, bearing along many levels of input and output knowledge. The proposed ontological representation, expresses and defines a target product as a metamodel. Combined with knowledge about the scientific background of the product, an aspect model at physical concept level is generated from the metamodel and is further converted into a design model. This scheme enables knowledge to be used not only for representation but also for reasoning at functional level. The research logic followed herein does not bring yet another ontology building methodology through a project-management context, but rather contributes to an ontological approach for exploring the diverse knowledge inputs that a product requires through a specific domain-derived and domain-oriented context, which relies on a collaborative model building methodology and a systemic modeling formalism by using 2nd order cybernetics in order to include human intervention.     

Towards a framework to manage formalised exchanges during collaborative design

New organizational frameworks for companies dealing with product development are required for the new market rules as for the rising pressure and complexity in product and process development. Thus, the new stake is to examine new methods of leading design activities as the cooperative design that deals with the sharing of various interests and resources among various actors, with the aim of reaching a common purpose. The latter lay on the development of products by means of knowledge sharing and interactions with a certain level of coordination between these varied activities. Embedded into the IPPOP research project perspectives, this paper focus on the particular collaborative situation of conflict management occurring during design activities. From an analysis of the conflict management domain, we shall specify a collaborative design framework dedicated to conflict handling thanks to one specification method based on the UML language. The specified solving process is applied on a real-life industrial case: a windmill stator sheet design. The design context of the artefact is exposed and the met conflicts are explained. Extracts of IPPOP demonstrator's graphical user interfaces, illustrating these collaborative aspects of the software application are then presented. They show the ability of the demonstrator to run the conflict solving process and to subscribe relevant actors in this process as well as filers to track pertinent past solutions suitable for the current problem.     

Discovering collaborative knowledge-intensive processes through e-mail mining

Knowledge Management aims to promote the growth, communication and preservation of knowledge within an organization, which includes managing the appropriate resources to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. Business Process-Oriented Knowledge Management focuses on discovering and representing the dynamic conversion of existing knowledge among participants involved in executing business processes. In this context, Knowledge-Intensive Processes are a very important and challenging specific subclass of processes, since they strongly involve socialization and informal exchanges of knowledge among participants. This paper describes in detail a method for semi-automatic discovery of relevant information characterizing Knowledge-Intensive Processes, as well as the results of further evaluation of the method. Our approach draws on the informal exchange of existing knowledge in collaborative tools such as e-mails. The output is a conceptual map that describes the main elements of a Knowledge-Intensive Process, as well as their relationships. The results from the case study conducted to evaluate the method in an organization underlined the prospects for using collaborative environments to discover the way agents perform their activities.     

A collaborative system for capturing and reusing in-context design knowledge with an integrated representation model

Current research on design knowledge capture and reuse has predominantly focused on either the codification view of knowledge or the personalisation view of knowledge, resulting in a failure to address designers’ knowledge needs caused by a lack of context of information and insufficient computational support. Precisely motivated by this gap, this work aims to address the integration of these two views into a complete, contextual and trustworthy knowledge management scheme enabled by the emerging collaborative technologies. Specifically, a knowledge model is developed to represent an integrated knowledge space, which can combine geometric model, knowledge-based analysis codes and problem-solving strategies and processes. On this basis, a smart collaborative system is also designed and developed to streamline the design process as well as to facilitate knowledge capture, retrieval and reuse as users with different roles are working on various tasks within this process. An engineering case study is undertaken to demonstrate the idea of collaborative knowledge creation and sharing and evaluate the effectiveness of the knowledge representation model and the collaborative technologies employed. As evidenced in the development and evaluation, the methods proposed are effective for capturing an integrated knowledge space and the collaborative knowledge management system not only facilitates problem-solving using knowledge-based analysis but also supplies in-context tacit knowledge captured from the communications between users throughout the design process.     

A hypernetwork-based context-aware approach for design lesson-learned knowledge proactive feedback in design for manufacturing

Design lesson-learned knowledge (DLK) clearly describes various design quality problems exposed in past manufacturing stages, solutions and preventive measures. If knowledge management system could proactively feed DLK back into design process, many previous quality problems would be avoided, thus helping designers better implement design for manufacturing (DFM) in a smarter manner. However, since design quality problems are not pointed out in design process, problem-relevant information extracted from design contexts might be inaccurate. In this situation, traditional context-aware approach is prone to acquire design quality problems that designers do not need. Facing these challenges, a hypernetwork-based context-aware DLK proactive feedback approach is proposed to construct hypernetwork-based DLK representation model and predict possible design quality problems in the design process, thus providing corresponding DLK and helping designers reduce the reoccurrence of previous quality problems in DFM. Specifically, hypernetwork-based DLK representation model is first constructed, which consists of designer context network, task context network and DLK network. Based on this model, a context-aware collaborative reason strategy is constructed to predict possible design quality problems according to complex design contexts. To validate the proposed approach, a practical product development case on the shipbuilding design is implemented, and some comparative experiments are conducted. Experiment results show the proposed approach is effective and has a positive performance in DFM. It is anticipated this work opens up a promising way to help designers reuse DLK for reducing the reoccurrence of previous design quality problems in a smarter manner, thus better implementation of DFM.     

基于转化策略的异质超网络表示学习

与传统网络相比,超网络结构更加复杂,并对现有网络表示学习方法提出了很大的挑战。为了克服网络表示学习面临的超网络结构的挑战,提出一种基于转化策略的异质超网络表示学习方法MT2vec。首先,结合团扩展和星型扩展将抽象为超图的异质超网络转换为抽象的2-截图+关联图的异质网络;然后提出一种感知节点语义相关性的元路径游走方法来捕获节点之间的成对关系和元组关系;最后,设计一种结合多层感知器的skip-gram优化模型同时训练节点成对相似性和元组相似性来获得节点表示向量。通过在三个不同类型的超网络数据集上进行实验。结果表明MT2vec算法在链接预测和超网络重建任务中,效果优于其他基线方法。     

Machine learning and CBR integrated mechanical product design approach

Many works based on case-based reasoning (CBR) and rule-based reasoning (RBR) have been done to obtain a product concept intelligently, but researches on automatic and intelligent methods for the detailed design process are still lacking. To achieve the intelligent design of the whole process for mechanical product development, an approach based on cases and knowledge is proposed. First, considering that the actual product cases sample is small, correlations among product features and relationships between product features and requirements are evaluated based on design knowledge. According to these correlations and relationships, a design problem is decomposed into multiple parallel small-scale sub-problems not only to increase data samples but reduce data dimensions. Moreover, a hybrid method that combined Hamming distance with Euclidean distance is generated to retrieve similar cases, which can address both numerical and encoding factors. In addition, K-Nearest-Neighbor (KNN) algorithm and Linear regression are adopted to adapt the classification and numeric parameters, respectively, so that the detailed design process can be achieved without fixed knowledge template. Finally, a tool design software is developed based on Visual studio 2015 to verify the practicability of the proposed method.     

A smart conflict resolution model using multi-layer knowledge graph for conceptual design

Reducing the impact of conflicts on requirement-function-structure mapping in the early stage of product design is an important measure to achieve conceptual innovation, which relies on accurate reasoning of multi-domain knowledge. As product requirements become more personalized and diverse, traditional discrete knowledge organization and reasoning methods are difficult to adapt to the challenges of continuity and precision in conceptual solution. Knowledge graphs with complex networks have obvious advantages in association detection, knowledge visualization, and explainable reasoning of implicit knowledge, which offer innovative opportunities for conflict resolution in conceptual design. Therefore, a smart conflict resolution model using a multi-layer Knowledge Graph for Conceptual Design(mKGCD) is proposed in this study. A knowledge expression form of FBS-oriented design patent vocabulary is proposed, which is used for knowledge entity recognition and relation extraction based on natural language processing. A label mapping method based on inventive principles is used for patent classification and a four-layer semantic network for conflict resolution is constructed. Through semantic distance calculation, the designer's requirements for function/behavior/structure are smart deployed to obtain appropriate knowledge. A case study of the conceptual design of a collapsible installation and handling equipment demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed approach. The proposed method can not only meet the functional solution and innovation in the context of different design requirements, but also effectively improve the design efficiency in the iterative design process by means of multiple meanings of one graph.     

Text analysis for constructing design representations

An emerging model in concurrent product design and manufacturing is the federation of workgroups across traditional functional ‘silos’. Along with the benefits of this concurrency comes the complexity of sharing and accessing design information. The primary challenge in sharing design information across functional workgroups lies in reducing the complex expressions of associations between design elements. Collaborative design systems have addressed this problem from the perspective of formalizing a shared ontology or product model. We share the perspective that the design model and ontology are an expression of the ‘meaning’ of the design and provide a means by which information sharing in design may be achieved. However, in many design cases, formalizing an ontology before the design begins, establishing the knowledge sharing agreements or mapping out the design hierarchy is potentially more expensive than the design itself. This paper introduces a technique for inducing a representation of the design based upon the syntactic patterns contained in the corpus of design documents. The association between the design and the representation for the design is captured by basing the representation on terminological patterns at the design text. In the first stage, we create a ‘dictionary’ of noun-phrases found in the text corpus based upon a measurement of the content carrying power of the phrase. In the second stage, we cluster the words to discover inter-term dependencies and build a Bayesian belief network which describes a conceptual hierarchy specific to the domain of the design. We integrate the design document learning system with an agent-based collaborative design system for fetching design information based on our ‘smart drawings’ paradigm.     

异地产品协同设计系统的构建方法研究

提出基于屏幕共享与远程控制技术的总线型产品协同设计系统的构造方法，并利用此方法构建产品异地协同设计系统(PCDS)．该方法能大大降低系统实施的成本，重用企业已有的软件资源．介绍了系统构建的方法、体系结构框架与关键技术．     

Bridging the Information Transfer Gap: Measuring Goodness of Information Fit

The ability to determine, a priori, how well an interface design meets the information needs of a user—that is, to ‘bridge the information transfer gap’—is a critical component of any intelligent interface design system. Yet most current approaches either sidestep the problem of computationally measuring ‘goodness of fit’ by compiling design knowledge into a set of pattern matching rules or, at best, use a very limited set of parameters in scoring. We describe a formal representation for capturing the information needs associated with user tasks and the information conveying capabilities of interface elements. A multifaceted scoring technique, using this representation, is presented for assessing a design's goodness of fit against current user requirements. The hallmarks of this approach are the explicit representation of the goals of good user interface design, evaluation of a proposed design against these goals and a computational approach to performing tradeoffs among these goals when incompatible. Finally, we report on the implementation and user acceptance of this design in an adaptive interface application for military attack/scout helicopters.     

A collaborative Design for Usability approach supported by Virtual Reality and a Multi-Agent System embedded in a PLM environment

This paper details a collaborative workstation design approach integrating knowledge based on engineering process, using a Multi-Agent System (MAS) on a Virtual Reality (VR) platform. The MAS supports R&D teams to extract and re-use engineering knowledge so as to improve their efficiency in developing new products. Our research targets the development of a knowledge engineering system integrated into a PLM-Product Life cycle Management-environment linked with virtual reality tools. A PLM is a strategic business approach with a consistent set of methodologies and software solutions. It is meant to promote collaborative creation, management, delivery and proper use of this life cycle definition and information product in multinational companies. This system is used by engineers to carry out projects in a collective way while conveying a defined process. The MAS allows capitalization, and to annotate knowledge according to the actions of the designers inside a PLM environment. Then, this knowledge is used by VR tools to analyze various aspects of the virtual prototype such as manufacturing, maintenance, reliability or ergonomics. Consequently, we use expert knowledge to pilot the design process of a virtual prototype inside a three-dimensional immersive virtual reality platform. In this context, our paper describes our knowledge management approach applied to improve ergonomics and collaborative design in industrial areas.     

Knowledge-based integrated product design framework towards sustainable low-carbon manufacturing

With a global challenge on the serious ecological problems, low-carbon manufacturing aiming to reduce carbon emission and resource consumption is gaining the ever-increasing attention. Due to the significant impact on the product lifecycle, low-carbon product design is considered as an effective and attractive approach to improve the eco-market trade-off of electromechanical products. Existing low-carbon product design approaches focus on solving specific low-carbon problems, and how to explore and navigate the integrative design space considering low-carbon and knowledge in a holistic perspective is rarely discussed. In response, this paper proposes a knowledge-based integrated product design framework to support low-carbon product development. An ontology-based knowledge modelling approach is put forward to represent the multidisciplinary design knowledge to facilitate knowledge sharing and integration. Subsequently, a function–structure synthesis approach based on case-based reasoning is presented to narrow down the design space to generate suitable design solutions for achieving desired functions. A multi-objective mathematical model is established, and the multi-objective particle swarm optimization is adopted to solve the low-carbon product optimization. Furthermore, a decision-making ranking approach based on the closeness degree is employed to prioritize the potential solutions from Pareto set. Finally, a case study of low-carbon product design of hydraulic machine is demonstrated to show the effectiveness.     

Design rationale capture for process improvement in the globalised enterprise: an industrial study

Design rationale fills in the gaps between the original requirements of a system and the finished product encompassing decisions, constraints and other information that influenced the outcome. Existing research in Software Engineering corroborates the importance of design rationale to capture knowledge assets, particularly in the context of the global enterprise, with its increased reliance on IT systems, and risk of knowledge loss through staff movement and attrition. Despite this, the practice of design rationale capture is not as extensive as could be expected due to reasons which include time and budget constraints, the lack of standards and tools, and some uncertainty as to its actual added value. In this paper, we address the viability and benefits of capturing design rationale as a by-product of design in the context of a real-world global organisational setting. This was achieved through a study in which an emerging design approach—Problem Oriented Engineering—was applied in the context of a global financial institution to address a critical IT problem as part of its software supplier’s client resolution process. The study provides some positive evidence that the approach-guided knowledge capture of key design rationale elements and that it combined well with existing practices within the organisation and even led to improvement to one of their key processes.