Chris McMahon

Knowledge management in engineering design: personalization and codification

Knowledge management is one of the key enabling technologies of distributed engineering enterprises. It encompasses a wide range of organizational, management and technologically orientated approaches that promote the exploitation of an organizations intellectual assets. Knowledge management approaches may be divided into personalization approaches that emphasize human resources and communication, and codification approaches that emphasize the collection and organization of knowledge. This distinction is used to explore the application of knowledge management in engineering design, after first outlining the engineering circumstances that have led to the current emphasis on the application. The paper then gives an overview of approaches to knowledge management through personalization, including human and organizational approaches, concentrating on the establishment of communities of practice. The role of information technology is explained both in terms of personalization (communication and team support through computer-supported cooperative work) and of codification through information management, knowledge structuring and knowledge-based engineering. The paper concludes with a discussion of the match of knowledge management approach to engineering circumstance, and of the current challenges of knowledge management.

A simulated annealing-based optimization approach for integrated process planning and scheduling

A job shop needs to deal with a lot of make-to-order business, in which the orders are usually diverse in types but each one is small in volume. To increase the flexibility and responsiveness of the job shop in the more competitive market, process planning and scheduling modules have been actively developed and deployed. The functions of the two modules are usually complementary. It is ideal to integrate them more tightly to achieve the global optimization of product development and manufacturing. In this paper, a unified representation model and a simulated annealing-based approach have been developed to facilitate the integration and optimization process. In the approach, three strategies, including processing flexibility, operation sequencing flexibility and scheduling flexibility, have been used for exploring the search space to support the optimization process effectively. Performance criteria, such as makespan, the balanced level of machine utilization, job tardiness and manufacturing cost, have been systematically defined to make the algorithm adaptive to meet various practical requirements. Case studies under various working conditions and the comparisons of this approach with two modern evolutionary approaches are given. The merits and characteristics of the approach are thereby highlighted.

Development of robust design-for-remanufacturing guidelines to further the aims of sustainable development

Key manufacturing challenges include pollution, natural resource depletion, waste management and landfill space. Remanufacturing, a process of bringing used products to a ‘like-new’ functional state with warranty to match, is being regarded as a vital strategy in waste management and environmentally conscious manufacturing. There is a paucity of remanufacturing knowledge, particularly in design-for-remanufacturing (DFRem) because of its relative novelty in research terms. This paper outlines the elements of the remanufacturing concept, details existing design-for-remanufacturing research and describes findings from recent UK industrial case studies undertaken to verify and augment previous research. It proposes some fundamental steps required to build on past work to improve the robustness of DFRem methodologies.

A study of issues relating to information management across engineering SMEs

The use of information and consequently the development of more effective strategies for its management are widely accepted as being important issues for any organisation. This is particularly the case for engineering SMEs in the Advanced Engineering sector where systematic knowledge resources are critical for achieving and sustaining competitive advantage. However, relatively little empirical work has been undertaken which seeks to explore and understand the barriers to improving information management for this class of organisation. To address this, an in-depth study of issues within 10 engineering SMEs has been undertaken. This paper presents an overview of the research method and describes the process of eliciting and filtering the issues. Using the filtered results a set of core issues is developed that characterises the range of issues currently facing engineering SMEs. An indication of the relative significance of these core issues is obtained by reclassifying the initial empirical data against the core set of issues. It is further argued that in practise many of these core issues are related to one another. To explore these relationships, the dependencies and causalities between core issues are explored. This reveals a set of fundamental issues which may be considered to represent the key barriers to improving information management within engineering SMEs. These barriers and their implications for improving information management are discussed with respect to the information flow in engineering SMEs and a number of important considerations are highlighted. The findings of this study and the understanding gained are critical for improving information management and the development and long-term planning of the information systems strategy.

Improving reuse of in‐service information capture and feedback

Purpose – The adoption of the product‐service system business model means that the designing company has greater scope and motivation to learn from experience of its products in use to improve their core design and engineering capabilities. Continuous improvement, however, depends crucially upon the implementation of effective knowledge and information management (KIM) systems within a dynamic learning environment that impinge on diverse communities throughout the product lifecycle. This paper aims to address these issues.Design/methodology/approach – This paper consolidates literature reviews and presents empirical observations relating to the current KIM systems and practices within large aerospace and manufacturing companies. In particular, experiences from a case study to enhance reuse of in‐service feedback conducted with an aerospace company are reported.Findings – The empirical observations suggest that the feedback processes rely on a combination of formal and informal personalization and codifica...

Characterising the requirements of engineering information systems

Well-organised information is vital in gaining a competitive advantage within engineering companies. Increasingly, computer systems are used for managing this information, but for systems to be successful they need to be built on an understanding of how engineers work. This paper contributes to this understanding by reporting on how 10 engineers, from two aerospace companies, organise and use information. Information profiles have been proposed as a means of identifying the requirements of engineers who are working in different design situations (characterised by the stage of the design life cycle and also the social environment in which the engineers work). The results indicate important differences in the extent to which personal, local group and company-wide information is used. In particular, clear differences are identified between engineers who can be considered as company experts and those involved in mainstream design activities. These differences manifest themselves in the extent to which personal and local group information collections are used, the content and also the strategies used for storing and updating the material within these stores.

Making sense of engineering design review activities

Abstract Engineering design reviews, which take place at predetermined phases of the product development process, are fundamental elements for the evaluation and control of engineering activities. These meetings are also acknowledged as unique opportunities for all the parties involved to share information about the product and related engineering processes. For product development teams, the knowledge generated during a design review is not as secondary as it may seem; key design decisions, design experiences, and associated rationale are frequently made explicit. Useful work has been carried out on the design review process itself, but little work has been undertaken about the detailed content of the meeting activity; it is argued that understanding the transactions that take place during a meeting is critical to building an effective knowledge-oriented recording strategy. To this effect, an extensive research program based on case studies in the aerospace engineering domain has been carried out. The work reported in this paper focuses on a set of tools and methods developed to characterize and analyze in depth the transactions observed during a number of case studies. The first methodology developed, the transcript coding scheme, uses an intelligent segmentation of meeting discourse transcriptions. The second approach, which bypasses the time consuming transcribing operation, is based on a meeting capture template developed to enable a meeting observer to record the transactions as the meeting takes place. A third method, the information mapping technique, has also been developed to interpret the case study data in terms of decisions, actions, rationale, and lessons learned, effectively generating qualitative measures of the information lost in the formal records of design reviews. Overall, the results generated by the set of tools presented in this paper have fostered a practical strategy for the knowledge intensive capture of the contents of design reviews. The concluding remarks also discuss possible enhancements to the meeting analysis tools presented in this paper and future work aimed at the development of a computer supported capture software for design reviews.

Review article: A review of structured document retrieval (SDR) technology to improve information access performance in engineering document management

Information retrieval (IR) is a well-established research and development area. Document formats such as SGML (Standard Generalised Mark-up Language) and XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) have become widely used in recent years. Traditional IR systems demonstrate limitations when dealing with such documents, which motivated the emergence of structured document retrieval (SDR) technology intending to overcome these limitations. This paper reviews the work carried out from the inception to the development and application of SDR in engineering document management. The key issues of SDR are discussed and the state of the art of SDR to improve information access performance has been surveyed. A comparison of selected papers is provided and possible future research directions identified. The paper concludes with the expectation that SDR will make a positive impact on the process of engineering document management from document construction to its delivery in the future, and undoubtedly provide better information retrieval performance in terms of both precision and functionality.

Observations on Modes of Incremental Change in Design

SUMMARY This paper presents a framework for the classification of modes of historical development of normal design, and for tracing this development as products mature. Normal design involves the incremental development of an existing design principle. Designs are defined in terms of sets of explicit and implicit attributes, and the framework is based on a model in which design involves searching within a design space, subject to the requirements of a product design specification. Five modes of design change are identified: design parameter space exploration; improvement in understanding of design attribute relationships; change in product design specification; modification of the feasible design space; and adoption of a new design principle. These modes of change are illustrated by considering the development of automotive engine piston design.

Uncertainty in Through-Life Costing–-Review and Perspectives

Estimating through-life cost (TLC) is an area that is critical to many industrial sectors, and in particular, within the defense and aerospace where products are complex and have extended life cycles. One of the key problems in modeling the cost of these products is the limited life-cycle information at the early stage. This leads to epistemic and aleatory uncertainty within the estimation process in terms of data, estimation techniques, and scenarios analysis. This paper presents a review of the uncertainty classification in engineering literature and the nature of uncertainty in TLC estimation. Based on the review, the paper then presents a critique of the current uncertainty modeling approaches in cost estimation and concludes with suggestion for the requirement of a different approach to handling uncertainty in TLC. The potential value of imprecise probability should be explored within the domain of TLC to assist cost estimators and decision makers in understanding and assessing the uncertainty. The implication of such a representation in terms of decision making under risk and decision making under uncertainty is also discussed.