Knowledge integration and sharing for complex product development

Product development is a highly creative and knowledge-intensive process that involves extensive information and knowledge exchange and sharing among geographically distributed teams and developers. How to best integrate such heterogeneous product knowledge has become an extremely important knowledge management (KM) subject associated with product development. Product development knowledge integration and sharing is becoming a key issue in the enterprise KM. This paper addresses the challenges of product development knowledge integration and sharing during product development. The aim of this research work effort is to develop a method to enhance the integration and sharing of product knowledge during the development phase. This study presents a systematic approach to developing knowledge integration and sharing for product development. The proposed approach includes the steps for designing a framework of product development knowledge sharing, developing representation model for product development knowledge, designing product development knowledge sharing process, designing product development knowledge integration ontology, developing knowledge integration and sharing method for product development based on ontology, and implementation of product development knowledge integration and sharing method. The proposed method could bring out an efficient and proactive way for knowledge integration and sharing among product developers in the product development process.