The Role of Knowledge in Next-generation Product Development Systems

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.