A Kbe System for the Design of Wind Tunnel Models Using Reusable Knowledge Components

Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) has gradually gained prominence as a major tool to speed up product development, especially in large scale projects such the ones that take place in aerospace and automotive industry. The encoding of design knowledge from domain experts into computer codes that can generate complex geometric data has demonstrated significant savings in manpower and time resources for routine design problems. This paper is the experience of the development of a KBE application for the design and manufacture of a wind tunnel testing model of an aircraft nacelle. The industrial project is aimed to investigate the feasibility of KBE introduction in the company. This causes the researcher to achieve effective design task automation and at the same time consider how the KBE codes could be extended to other products in the company. The adoption of reusable knowledge components is then introduced as the response to the knowledge modelling issues in current KBE systems.