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.

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. The framework of dimensional analysis is used for case-based reasoning. For all case descriptions in engineering and physics consisting of real-valued quantities with physical units, the Pi-Theorem of Buckingham can be shown to derive appropriate similarity conditions and provide an appropriate case adaptation. The advantages of the Pi-Theorem are mainly based on the properties of the so-called dimensionless groups, which are associated with each case description and can be determined even if closed form analytical modeling knowledge is not known. In precisely defined situations (in so-called completely similar cases) the knowledge of the dimensionless groups turns out to be sufficient to guarantee the correct transformation and correct case adaptation of the old problem solution to the new problem solution. In cases where such a completely similar case is not known or available, a dimensionless function interpolation technique is used and its numerical performance is investigated a...

One of the characteristics of design is that designers rely extensively on past experience in order to create new designs. Because of this, memory-based techniques from artificial intelligence, which help store, organise, retrieve, and reuse experiential knowledge held in memory, are good candidates for aiding designers. Another characteristic of design is the phenomenon of exploration in the early stages of design configuration. A designer begins with an ill-structured, partially defined, problem specification, and through a process of exploration gradually refines and modifies it as his/her understanding of the problem improves. In this paper we describe demex, an interactive computer-aided design system that employs memory-based techniques to help its users explore the design problems they pose to the system, in order to acquire a better understanding of the requirements of the problems. demex has been applied in the domain of structural design of buildings. 1 Introduction One of...

ion strategy during local components comparison. The local-root of the component x will be denoted: local-root(x). . function defines the role (the task) of a given component in a flowsheet aggregation. The function of the component x will be denoted: function(x). . quantity defines how many identical components perform the function specified in the function slot. . weight is a real value Î <0;1> that indicates the importance of a given components in the whole assembly. The value of a component x weight will be denoted: weight(x). Additionally each subclass of the component class has domain-specific slots and methods for computing local similarity between two instance components. Thanks to polymorphism the proper domain specific formula is used. Pump Reactor Pump-1 - class - instance - is-a relationship - a-part-of relationship Pump-2 Hydrog. C3 Flowsheet-1 Flowsheet-2 Reactor-1 Reactor-2 Component Hydrog. C6-C8 Process Pipe Pipe-1 Pipe-2 Fig.1. The object-oriented flowsheet repre...

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EADOCS (Expert Assisted Design Of Composite Sandwich panels) is a multi-level and hybrid expert system for innovative conceptual design. The objectives for conceptual design support are to assess the feasibility and optimality of alternative solutions and to find the best concept for further detailed design. Case-based reasoning is applied to generate conceptual designs and to refine their structure. Specialist operations for structural adaptation are not available in EADOCS and structural adaptations have to be retrieved from the case-base. This paper presents a domain independent approach to retrieve and reuse case components for structural adaptation. 1 Introduction The design cycle can be divided in three phases; conceptual, preliminary and detailed design. The conceptual design phase is the first phase starting with an initial specification of design requirements and preferences for the solution. The objective is to find the "best" design, which involves the configuration of a de...

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... This paper proposes an approach that enables capturing and representation of weakly structured information for the purpose of case-based structural design. The representation proposed allows us to apply most of the objectoriented abstract principles also on weakly structured information. It is also shown how the conceptual framework, the dependency structure, and the design process can be captured, represented, and used in CBD. The approach is successfully implemented into a prototype for reuse of computerized design calculation documents.