Integrated Documentation of Procedural Knowledge in Product Development

Information and knowledge management were introduced in the engineering field to help product developers avoid "reinventing the wheel". As PDM and DMS systems manage the whole information about a developed product, no software systems for capturing, managing and analysis of the product development processes are available. This information is usually stored only in the mind of the involved engineers and therefore cannot be reused by other people for new similar tasks. In the last three years the chair for Information Technology in Mechanical Engineering developed several methods and tools for the management of procedural knowledge in the product development. The developed GIDAS software assistant is able to store the whole product and process information produced during the design (CAD) and calculation (CAE) process of a product. In addition the complex background information (implicit knowledge) like decisions, assumptions, trial iterations, simplifications can be stored and reused in an integrated and user friendly manner. Currently the chair is extending the functionality of GIDAS to the whole product life cycle, as well as developing new methods for the automated reuse of this procedural knowledge. The results of this work will contribute to reduce the product development time and the development costs by increasing at the same time the product quality.