Eric Lutters

A knowledge network approach supporting the value chain

Pro-active management of the knowledge supply chain facilitates rapid technology, product and enterprise innovation. Collaboration has become an imperative for innovation. The knowledge “explosion” and abundant connectivity hampers rapid innovation and leads to communication overload. Structuring collaborative knowledge, exchanged via an integrated knowledge network, fosters the rapid exploitation of knowledge. An adequate (adaptable) configuration of network components within a domain of knowledge is required. This paper provides a framework for such an Integrated Knowledge Network (IKN); it also provides a navigation space to access knowledge contextualized with project life cycles. A practical case study that facilitates innovation research in this manner, spanning different private and public domains and including more than 100 projects, 130 users and in excess of 30.000 documents is briefly discussed.

Improved utilisation of organisational documents using a conceptual framework

For a business to remain competitive in the global marketplace, agile decision-making capability is vital. A thorough understanding of the organisation’s high-level entities and their relations, modelled in a Conceptual Framework (CF), facilitates well-informed business decisions. A CF eases the exploitation of organisational information by means of visual querying using self-explanatory entity and relation names. The CF is populated with actual information by linking it to key informational entities residing in electronic, organisational documents. A Mapping Layer is used to realise and maintain the interface between the relevant electronic documents and the CF.

Head Sensitivity for Designing Bicycle Helmets with Improved Physical Comfort

Bicycle helmets help reducing head injuries in cycling accidents, but they are not always popular. Discomfort is a major barrier for bicycle helmet use. Improper anthropometric design of the inner structure of a helmet can result in local peak pressure on the skin of the scalp. The purpose of this study was to examine the spatial variations in maximum allowed pressure on the head. Mean maximum allowed pressure on the head was 13,2N (SE 0,2) for females and 16,5N (SE 0,2) for men. The superior frontal area (19,4N, SE 0,7) and the central occipital area (18,3N, SE 0,7N) were the least sensitive areas for male test persons. For females, also the central occipital area had a low sensitivity. In contrast, the inferior frontal area was the most sensitive for men (12,4N SE 0,7N) and women (9,7N SE 0,8N). Headgear should avoid pressure points in areas with high sensitivity.

‘What-if’ Design as an Integrative Method in Product Design

In product development, many different aspects simultaneously influence the advancement of the process. Many specialists contribute to the specification of products, whilst in the meantime the consistency and mutual dependencies have to be preserved. Consequently, much effort is spent on mere routine tasks, which primarily distract members of the development team of their main task of creating the best solution for the design problem at hand. Many of these routine tasks can be translated into problems with a more or less tangible structure; often they are in fact an attempt to assess the consequences of a certain design decision on the rest of the product definition. Therefore, such questions can be formulated as: “what happens if....”. The question is subsequently translated into a need for evolution of the information content determining the product definition. Based on this need for information, immediate workflow management processes can be triggered. This results in a ‘train’ of design and engineering processes that are carried out, leading to a viable answer to the question. As the structure of a ‘what-if’ question is independent of the domain under consideration, the ‘what-if’ questions can relate to any aspect in the information content at any level of aggregation. Consequently ‘what-if’ questions can range from anything between ‘What if another machine tool is used’ to ‘What does this product look like if it is made from sheet metal’. Such a way of looking at products under development obviously strongly binds different domains and downstream processes under consideration, thus enabling a more integrated approach of the design process.