Abstract
M.Ing. (Engineering Management)
The growing need for customized solutions and faster product delivery obliges the
product development industry to develop new strategies that can enable the rapid and
flexible design of products. Several design approaches have been developed to
address this issue: one such is Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE), which is a design
technique that enables the automation of the design process. This approach consists of
using computational intelligence to capture the design rules related to a product family
in order to generate automatically customized designs adapted to particular customer
requirements. Knowledge-Based Engineering is also used to facilitate the performance
of design evaluation activities such as finite element analysis (FEA) and computational
fluid dynamics (CFD) as part of multi-disciplinary design optimization (MDO). The
application of this approach led to impressive results mostly in the automotive and
aeronautical industry. Owing to this method, some companies manage to reduce the
duration of the design process by 90%.
Despite the excellent results obtained through the use of Knowledge-Based
Engineering, there are still very few companies that make use of this approach in their
design process. The review of the relevant literature showed that the lack of a standard
easy-to-use methodology of implementation is one of the major obstacles to the
expansion of Knowledge-Based Engineering. The knowledge processing phase
constitutes one of the main challenges of the KBE implementation process. This phase
consists of extracting and documenting the knowledge embedded in the design team in
order to convert it in a programming code. Available methodologies such as MOKA and
KNOMAD do not seem to provide easy-to-use methods to represent the design
knowledge in a form that makes it easy to be programmed. The lack of a preliminary
stage that justifies the adequacy of KBE for a particular design process is also an
important gap identified in the literature.This dissertation discusses a detailed method that addresses issues related to
knowledge processing and suitability analysis in KBE implementation. The knowledge
processing method suggested is based on the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) which
is used widely in the system engineering approach and consists of a very logical
classification of the design knowledge. The strength of this method lies in its ability to
represent the design knowledge in a form that makes it understandable for both
engineers and programmers. Appropriate representation of this sort shortens the
duration of the knowledge processing and facilitates the knowledge programming
phase. Regarding the rationale for choosing of KBE, a detailed suitability assessment
method is proposed.