Mobile knowledge management for product life-cycle design

As products become more complex, a significant amount of design knowledge support is required by designers during the design process. However, given that the design process is not only confined within a design office, knowledge support must be provided to designers even when they are away from their usual workplace. This provision of knowledge is essential for designers to take sound decisions that span through the whole product life-cycle, from the conceptual design stage to the disposal phase. Hence, designers require design tools that support them at considering the consequences based on these decisions. With the ever-increasing popularity of mobile devices (such as PDAs, smartphones and pocket PCs), access to such knowledge can be greatly facilitated. The contribution of this paper consists in the presentation of a mobile Knowledge Management (mKM) system architecture that provides distributed engineering designers situated in mobile work settings with design knowledge support in the form of 'life-cycle consequences' during the design process.