Design Repositories: Engineering Design's New Knowledge Base

DESIGN OF COMPLEX ENGINEERing systems has increasingly become a collaborative task among teams that are physically, geographically, and temporally separated. The complexity of modern products means that a single designer or design team can no longer manage the complete product development effort. An enterprise that tries to develop products without sufficient expertise in a broad set of disciplines can suffer from long product development cycles, higher development costs, and quality problems. On the other hand, ensuring comprehensive technical proficiency in a world where the trend is toward more multidisciplinary design can become an equally costly undertaking for a company. Driven by such issues, companies increasingly staff only their core competencies inhouse, depending on other firms to provide the complementary design knowledge and effort needed for a complete product. As design becomes increasingly knowledgeintensive and collaborative, the need for computational design frameworks to support the representation and use of knowledge among distributed designers becomes more critical. Although advances in Internet computing have improved the means for sharing and exchanging information, the more significant barrier to product development is not the problem of providing distributed access to distributed information but of finding the information that’s needed. Industry’s need for rapid retrieval and subsequent reuse of knowledge to reduce product development times has resulted in a sharper focus on methods for representing and storing engineering artifact knowledge. Traditional design databases, which merely provide access to schematics, computer-aided design (CAD) models, and documentation, are inadequate for this purpose. The emerging research area of design repositories aims to address these industry needs (see the “Design repositories” sidebar). The goal of this research is not to provide commercial-quality software for creating design repositories but to offer prototypes that prove the utility of the design repository concept. By highlighting and starting to address these issues, this work will speed up the transition and adoption of these kinds of technologies into industry. The NIST Design Repository Project