Information technology has played an increasingly important role in engineering product development. Its influence over the past decade has been accelerating and its impact in the coming decade will undoubtedly be immense. This paper surveys several research areas relating to knowledge representation, capture and retrieval, which will have a growing influence on product development. Each of these areas could, on its own, provide sufficient material for an entire survey paper. Unlike traditional survey papers, this paper does not attempt to provide a comprehensive review of a field of research from its inception to the present. Rather, this paper aims to touch on a representative selection of recent developments in these influential technical areas. The paper provides perspectives into the kinds of technologies that are emerging from rapidly expanding fields of research, and discusses challenges that must be overcome to enable transition of these technologies into industry practice to support the next generation of product development software tools.

In this paper we start with a brief introduction to the Functional Representation framework that a number of colleagues and we have been developing for over a decade or so. Then we move on to the need for a precise language for describing objects, properties and causal relations. We argue that such a language is needed to express the meaning of terms such as "function" and "behavior." We briefly describe a formal framework for and definition of device function that we have recently developed. We have sought the smallest ontological framework that is sufficient for developing an idea of function. Functions are defined in terms of the effects of objects on their environments. The definition of function is sufficiently general to express static and dynamic functions, intended and natural functions, and functions of abstract and physical objects.

Although Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) are forming the basis for a rapidly growing industry and fields of research, many MEMS designers still rely on backof-the-envelope calculations due to a lack of efficient computer-aided design (CAD) tools that can assist with the initial stages of design exploration. This paper introduces case-based reasoning (CBR) techniques to the design of MEMS, as part of a larger MEMS synthesis framework currently under development at UC Berkeley. Having the ability to draw upon past design knowledge is advantageous to the MEMS designer, allowing reuse and modification of previous successful designs to help deal with the complexities of a new design problem. CBR utilizes past successful MEMS designs and sub-assemblies as building blocks stored in an indexed library. Reasoning tools find cases in the library with solved problems similar to the current design problem in order to propose promising conceptual designs. This paper discusses case representation and case library design as well as the results of case retrieval studies, focusing on MEMS resonant structures. The paper recommends strategies for integrating the MEMS case library with evolutionary computation when parameter optimization over the retrieved conceptual designs is not sufficient or there are gaps of knowledge in the case library.

. This paper describes research on the simplification of designs using analogical reasoning. We present a definition of simplification and some examples, and then describe a prototype system that has been built to support our preliminary investigations of this problem. 1.0 Introduction This research is concerned with the representations and reasoning required for Design Simplification. A design can be considered as simpler than another for a variety of reasons, such as shape, use, or ease of assembly, for example. Simplification, as a consequence, can be done with a variety of goals. In addition, simplification can be done in a variety of ways. For example, simplifications might be searched for (i.e., reasoned out) or retrieved (e.g., using CBR). Our preliminary investigations are concerned with doing simplification by Analogy with stored simplifications. The designs are represented as Function, plus Behavior, plus Structure. Structure is represented in terms of attributes, compone...

Abstract – This paper describes a sharable engineering knowledge repository for capturing and accessing information about the structure, functions and behaviors of chemical process systems. The repository is configurable and designed for reuse across processes and for a variety of intelligent system applications. In this paper we present a formalism based on Functional Representation (FR) that is the unification of earlier variants dedicated to specific applications. Reuse for multiple applications is illustrated with a unified repository example applied to both design critique and HAZOP.

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this paper we showed that information displays can be viewed as a design problem, and how, based on this, the presentation process can be modeled as a design process. Functional design is an important part of the design of presentations. Interesting problems are raised in the domain of representing and reasoning about the functions of designed objects, especially static functions. We have listed a set of interesting research topics raised by our approach to presentation. Further research will concentrate on these topics.