Patrick Klein

Ontological Semantics of Standards and PLM Repositories in the Product Development Phase

In order to optimally exploit the large amounts of engineering information stored in contemporary PLM systems, the concept of knowledge based engineering (KBE) can be considered from a PLM perspective. By eventually combining product structures and implicit semantics provided by PLM-systems on the one hand, and domain-specific standards on the other hand we believe to have identified a key enabler for KBE. As an initial step we describe a coupling of a CAD system with a semantic representation of engineering knowledge using formal ontologies. By application of automatic reasoning, engineering knowledge gained from the product structure and domain-specific standards allows us to reduce time-consuming manual work in classifying overlaps between parts in a CAD model as intentional overlaps (e.g. with gaskets) or design failures.

Supporting Inclusive Design of Mobile Devices with a Context Model

The aim of inclusive product design is to successfully integrate a broad range of diverse human factors in the product development process with the intention of making products accessible to and usable by the largest possible group of users (Kirisci, Thoben et al. 2011). However, the main barriers for adopting inclusive product design include technical complexity, lack of time, lack of knowledge and techniques, and lack of guidelines (Goodman, Dong et al. 2006), (Kirisci, Klein et al. 2011). Although manufacturers of consumer products are nowadays more likely to invest efforts in user studies, consumer products in general only nominally fulfill, if at all, the accessibility requirements of as many users as they potentially could. The main reason is that any user-centered design prototyping or testing aiming to incorporate real user input, is often done at a rather late stage of the product development process. Thus, the more progressed a product design has evolved the more time-consuming and costly it will be to alter the design (Zitkus, Langdon et al. 2011). This is increasingly the case for contemporary mobile devices such as mobile phones or remote controls.

Supporting inclusive design of user interfaces with a virtual user model

The aim of inclusive design is to successfully integrate human factors in the product development process with the intention of making products accessible for the largest possible group of users. In order to meet this challenge, the involvement of human users has so far been an efficient approach. Yet, such ergonomics evaluation experiments that employ a versatility of user groups can be very time and cost-intensive. Therefore, virtual user models (VUM) have been proposed for supporting certain phases of the product development process. In this paper a model-based design approach is proposed, which supports inclusive design of physical user interfaces of consumer products at the early stages of product development. Accordingly the objective is to explore how virtual user models can be used to conceptualize user interfaces of consumer products in such a way that even the needs of users with physical impairments are fully considered.

Prototype of a virtual user modeling software framework for inclusive design of consumer products and user interfaces

The recent developments in technology inspire designers and engineers in creating more and more sophisticated and smart consumer products. However, the most ingenious device in the world will fail, if its users are not able to access the mastermind it provides. How can we best support product creators in the thorny task of inclusive design? In this paper a prototypic realization of a virtual user modeling framework to support designers in creating more inclusive products following the phase-based product development process is presented. A qualitative usability survey evaluated the acceptance of the proposed end-user applications among designers and the effectiveness of the recommendations-driven support --- the paper provides insights.

Improving problem solving capabilities in concurrent engineering via knowledge transformation & six complexity science principles

The six complexity science principles defined in this paper were introduced to employees in knowledge intensive, high-tech firms in a way that facilitated the transformation of implicit knowledge to explicit knowledge and which in turn supported problem solving processes and helped those involved respond to uncertainty. This was manifested by the way they were able to identify, understand and contrive possible explanations of their context specific problems through the language and insight provided by the six complexity principles. These results show that the knowledge transformation process initiated through interdependent learning about the 6 complexity science principles had a significant impact for case companies in terms of improving and increasing their problem solving capabilities.

Integrated semantic search in the product development phase

Finding relevant and needed information within companys specific repositories or internet resources has become a time consuming part of the development process. In order to optimally exploit the large amounts of engineering information one of the key challenges is, that an engineer has to be aware of proper keywords and all kind of relevant repositories in order to start a successful search. Especially with respect to unstructured repositories such as fileservers an explicit search process becomes complicated, time consuming and sometimes impossible, due to the lack of appropriate metadata. By combining existing technologies from the areas of natural language processing, search engines and desktop integration frameworks a concept for an integrated semantic search tool is proposed, where a user has not to be aware of the repositories and their specifics. As an intermediate result, we present a prototypical implementation, where the knowledge retrieval process is initiated in the background on basis of an automatic identification of a selected text paragraph and its semantic similarity to existing documents in an unstructured repository. This way the system delivers valuable context specific documents just by a simple click.

Are Smart Products Foiling Automated Design

Design Automation (DA) implements the idea of deriving the physical design of a product automatically from within codified engineering knowledge. If a product is no longer limited to be a physical device, it should be analysed if the idea of DA can be enhanced or if DA becomes obsolete for smart products. The authors believe that DA can even play a major role for the smart products development. Thus this paper additionally aims to provide a concept for an enhancement of DA. Instead of case based and locally implemented solutions, the concept relies on a central knowledge-based system in order to process the smart layer on top of the geometrical design. The proposed system should be grounded upon an ontology in order to represent the physical and the virtual domain at once. This way different kinds of product development applications can rely on one central knowledge-base.