Engineering Design Knowledge Management

In recent years, greater global competition is pressuring organizations to produce industrial products with the shortest possible lead times, high quality, and lowest costs. The lifecycle of a product includes many phases such as requirement definition, conceptual design, production, operation, maintenance, and so forth. Each phase in the lifecycle would involve the product information, for example, using some information that comes from other phase(s) and generating some new information during the phase. Engineering design knowledge (EDK) of a product consists of the product information related to the design process of the product. It should be noticed that modern products are complex, and their developments have increasingly become collaborative tasks among teams that are physically, geographically, and temporally separated (Caldwell et al., 2000; Szykman, Sriram, Bochenek, Racz, & Senfaute, 2000). As design becomes increasingly knowledge intensive and collaborative, traditional design databases, which merely provide access to schematics, computeraided design (CAD) models, and documentation, are inadequate for modern product design (Szykman et al., 2000), and the need for computational design frameworks to support the representation, integration, maintenance, and use of knowledge among distributed designers becomes more critical. The representation, integration, maintenance, and use of knowledge consist of the knowledge management of engineering knowledge.