Simon Szykman

The role of knowledge in next-generation product development systems

Information technology has played an increasingly important role in engineering productdevelopment. Its influence over the past decade has been accelerating and its impact inthe coming decade will undoubtedly be immense. This paper surveys several researchareas relating to knowledge representation, capture and retrieval, which will have agrowing influence on product development. Each of these areas could, on its own, providesufficient material for an entire survey paper. Unlike traditional survey papers, this paperdoes not attempt to provide a comprehensive review of a field of research from its incep-tion to the present. Rather, this paper aims to touch on a representative selection of recentdevelopments in these influential technical areas. The paper provides perspectives into thekinds of technologies that are emerging from rapidly expanding fields of research, anddiscusses challenges that must be overcome to enable transition of these technologies intoindustry practice to support the next generation of product development software tools.@DOI: 10.1115/1.1344238#

A foundation for interoperability in next-generation product development systems

United States industry spends billions of dollars as a result of poor interoperability between computer-aided engineering software tools. While ongoing standards development efforts are attempting to address this problem in todays tools, the more significant demand in next-generation tools will be for representations that allow information used or generated during various product development activities to feed forward and backward into others by way of direct electronic interchange. Although the next generation of tools has the potential for greatly increased benefits, there is also a potential for the cost of poor interoperability to multiply. The goal of this work is to develop representations of information that are unavailable in traditional computer-aided engineering tools to support the exchange of product information in a distributed product development environment. This paper develops a vision of next-generation product development systems and provides a core representation for product development information on which future systems can be built.

Design repositories: engineering design's new knowledge base

Driven by pressure to reduce product development time, industry has started looking for new ways to exploit stores of engineering artifact knowledge. Engineers are increasingly turning to design repositories as knowledge bases to help them represent, capture, share and reuse corporate design knowledge. The paper discusses the NIST Design Repository Project.

Enhancing Virtual Product Representations for Advanced Design Repository Systems

This paper describes the transformation of an existing set of heterogeneous product knowledge into a coherent design repository that supports product design knowledge archival and web-based search, display, and design model and tool generation. Guided by design theory, existing product information was analyzed and compared against desired outputs to ascertain what information management structure was needed to produce design resources pertinent to the design process. Several test products were catalogued to determine what information was essential without being redundant in representation. This set allowed for the creation of a novel single point of entry application for product information and the development of a relational database for design knowledge archival. Web services were then implemented to support design knowledge retrieval through search, browse, and real-time design tool generation. Further explored in this paper are the fundamental enabling technologies of the design repository system. Additionally, repository-generated design tools are scrutinized alongside human-generated design tools for validation. Through this process researchers have been able to improve the way in which artifact data are gathered, archived, distributed and used.

A Simulated Annealing-Based Approach to Three-Dimensional Component Packing

This paper introduces a simulated annealing-based approach to three-dimensional component packing that employs simulated annealing to generate optimal solutions. Simulated annealing has been used extensively for two-dimensional layout of VLSI circuits; this research extends techniques developed for two-dimensional layout optimization to three-dimensional problems which are more representative of mechanical engineering applications. This research also provides a framework in which to solve general component layout problems.

A web-based system for design artifact modeling

Abstract Engineering product development in todays industry is becoming increasingly knowledge intensive. The NIST Design Repository Project, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is working to develop infrastructural technologies to support the use of design repositories in industry. In contrast to traditional design databases, design repositories more actively support knowledge-based design, serving not only as archives, but as repositories of heterogeneous information that are designed to enable representation, capture, sharing, and reuse of corporate design knowledge. This paper presents a language that has been developed for the modeling of engineering design artifacts. The implementation of a prototype tool suite, which includes intelligent web-based interfaces that allow distributed users to create, edit and browse design repositories, is also described.

Constrained Three-Dimensional Component Layout Using Simulated Annealing

This research introduces a computational algorithm that uses simulated annealing to optimize three-dimensional component layouts. General component layout problems are characterized by three objectives: achieving high packing density, fitting components into a given container and satisfying spatial constraints on components. This paper focuses on the extension of a simulated annealing packing algorithm to a general layout algorithm through the implementation of a language of spatial constraints that are characteristic of layout problems. These constraints allow the designer to specify desired component proximities or to restrict translation or rotation of components based on a global origin or set of coordinate axes, or relative to other component locations or orientations. The layout of components from a cordless power drill illustrates the algorithm.

The NIST Design Repository Project

Modern engineering industry is relying more and more on the use of knowledge in product development. This paper advocates design repositories as a natural progression from traditional design databases to systems that are created to more actively support knowledge-based design. In contrast to traditional design databases, design repositories serve not only as archives, but as repositories of heterogeneous information that are designed to enable representation, capture, sharing, and reuse of corporate design knowledge. This paper describes the NIST Design Repository Project, an ongoing project within the Engineering Design Technologies Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The project objectives are to develop a computational framework for the creation of design repositories, and a proof-of-concept prototype to demonstrate their benefits. A number of research issues associated with the envisioned role of design repositories in industry are addressed. The current state of the project and its implementation are presented.

A Model for the Flow of Design Information in Product Development

The complexity of modern products and design tools has made the exchange of design information more complex. It is widely recognised that the seamless capture, storage, and retrieval of design information is one of the major challenges for the next generation of computer aided design tools. This paper presents a model for the flow of design information that is sufficiently formal to eventually support a semantics-based approach for developing information exchange standards. The model classifies design information into various types, organises these types into information states and levels of abstraction, and identifies the various transformations that operate within and between the information states. The model’s ability to support a variety of design process models is illustrated by applying it to the Systems Integration of Manufacturing Applications (SIMA) design process model, and the model is then applied to a design example.

An Analysis of Existing Ontological Systems for Applications in Manufacturing and Healthcare

The objective of the work described in this paper is to move closer to the ultimate goal of seamless system integration using the principle behind ontological engineering to unambiguously define domain-specific concepts. A major challenge facing industry today is the lack of interoperability between heterogeneous systems. This challenge is apparent in many sectors, including both healthcare and manufacturing. Current integration efforts are usually based solely on how information is represented (the syntax) without a description of what the information means (the semantics). With the growing complexity of information and the increasing need to completely and correctly exchange information among different systems, the need for precise and unambiguous capture of the meaning of concepts within a given system is becoming apparent.