Knowledge refinement for engineering knowledge management

Engineering design is a knowledge-intensive process, including conceptual design, detailed design, engineering analysis, assembly design, process design, and performance evaluation. Each of these tasks involves various aspects of knowledge and experience. They are the most valuable sources for capitalizing enterprise knowledge and know-how on building enterprise memory, which may become part of enterprise assets. Therefore, capturing and representing product design information, design intents, and underlining design knowledge for later reuse is the basis of and one of the key tasks in engineering knowledge management. This study develops an approach for engineering knowledge refinement to facilitate engineering knowledge management. This approach is basically a refinement process that includes the steps of knowledge capture, knowledge representation and storage, and knowledge compilation. This study involves the development of a semantic graph for describing product-related information, design intent and know-how, a tag-based scheme for representing various types of captured product information and engineering knowledge, a case-based representation for a designed entity, and the design of a knowledge compilation model and algorithm. The objective of this study can be achieved by performing the following tasks: (i) developing an engineering knowledge management framework, (ii) establishing an engineering knowledge refinement process, (iii) developing levels of knowledge representation schemes, and (iv) implementing engineering knowledge refinement mechanisms.