Proposal of Knowledge Model for Designing Product Architecture and Product Family

In order to keep global competences, recent manufacturers have been utilizing product families to diversify and enhance the product performance by simultaneously designing multiple products under commonalization and standardization. Design information of product architecture and family is inevitably more complicated and numerous than that of a single product. Thus, more sophisticated computer-based support system is required for product architecture and family design. This paper proposes a knowledge model for product architecture and family design support system. This research aims to tackle three problems which should be overcome when product family are modeled in the computer system; design repository without data redundancy and incorrectness, knowledge acquisition without forcing the additional effort on the designer, and integration of descriptive models to support early stage of design. The ontology of the knowledge model is defined as a foundation of resolving there problems. This paper is concluded with discussion of future works.