Steve J. Culley

A framework for the requirements of capturing, storing and reusing information and knowledge in engineering design

Data, information and knowledge are very important commodities for organisations. The effective utilisation of these commodities is increasingly the only way for organisations to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. In the field of mechanical engineering there are vast numbers of information and knowledge sources that are utilised throughout the design of an artefact or system. These may include documentation, component catalogues, past designs, new technologies, complex methodologies as well as a whole range of informal and formal sources developed through discussions and meetings. The effective utilisation and application of these information and knowledge commodities help enable the generation of feasible design alternatives and assist the decision-making process, which ultimately determines the success of the designed artefact. This paper discusses data, information and knowledge, providing formal definitions and an understanding of the relations and limitations of these resources. This understanding enables the development of better mechanisms and procedures for the capture and reuse of information and knowledge in engineering design. In particular, the approach of this work is to consider the intended reuse and level of application for knowledge in order to determine the requirements for its acquisition. Using this approach, an overall framework for the requirements of capturing, storing and reusing information and knowledge in engineering design is generated.

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 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.

Investigating ontology development for engineering design support

Ontologies are now in widespread use as a means of formalizing domain knowledge in a way that makes it accessible, shareable and reusable. Nevertheless, to many, the nature and use of ontologies are unfamiliar. This paper takes a practical approach - through the use of example - to clarifying what ontologies are and how they might be useful in an important and representative phase of the engineering design process, that of design requirement development and capture. The paper consists of two parts. In the first part ontologies and their use are discussed, and a methodology for developing ontologies is explored. In the second part, three very different types of ontology are developed in accordance with the methodology. Each of the ontologies captures a different conceptual facet of the engineering design domain, described at a quite different level of abstraction than the others. The process of developing ontologies is illustrated in a practical way and the application of these ontologies for supporting the capture of the engineering design requirement is described as a means of demonstrating the general potential of ontologies.

Waypoint: An Integrated Search and Retrieval System for Engineering Documents

This paper describes the architecture and technical capabilities of an integrated engineering information search and retrieval system. The system is designed with a flexible architecture that allows it to be incorporated in other software systems and also to itself incorporate a variety of different software components. It provides uniform access to multiple heterogeneous information collections and an integrated access mechanism allowing both keyword searching and browsing of classification schemes interchangeably in a single information access session. Browsing using the system is based on a faceted classification approach in which continual feedback is given to the user on how the results of a search task may be refined, by updating browsable classifications to reflect previous user selections. The classification scheme is populated using an automatic constraint-based classifier: The article describes the rationale behind the choice of the system architecture and the incorporated technologies, and also describes three examples developed using the system.

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.

An assessment of the role of design in the improvement of changeover performance

Discusses the derivation of current changeover improvement methodologies from the work of the Japanese engineer/consultant Shigeo Shingo. Argues that under the interpretation and widespread adoption of the single minute exchange of dies (SMED) philosophy, substantive design‐based solutions are being overlooked in favour of incremental, low cost, team‐based approaches which emphasize organizational changes to the changeover. Identifies difficulties which can arise with existing approaches to changeover improvement and the relative merits of emphasis on design or organization are discussed. Pays particular attention to the problems which have been observed in sustaining levels of improvement.

High value information in engineering organisations

The management of information in engineering organisations is facing a particular challenge in the ever-increasing volume of information. It has been recognised that an effective methodology is required to evaluate information in order to avoid information overload and to retain the right information for reuse. By using, as a starting point, a number of the current tools and techniques which attempt to obtain the value of information, it is proposed that an assessment or filter mechanism for information is needed to be developed. This paper addresses this issue firstly by briefly reviewing the information overload problem, the definition of value, and related research work on the value of information in various areas. Then a characteristic based framework of information evaluation is introduced using the key characteristics identified from related work as an example. A Bayesian Network diagram method is introduced to the framework to build the linkage between the characteristics and information value in order to quantitatively calculate the quality and value of information. The training and verification process for the model is then described using 60 real engineering documents as a sample. The model gives a reasonable accurate result and the differences between the model calculation and training judgements are summarised as the potential causes are discussed. Finally, several further issues including the challenge of the framework and the implementations of this evaluation assessment method are raised.

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.

A computational framework for retrieval of document fragments based on decomposition schemes in engineering information management

Abstract Retrieval of document fragments has a great potential for application in engineering information management. Frequently engineers have neither the time nor inclination to sift through long documents for small pieces of useful information. Yet it is frequently in the form of one or more long documents that the information that they seek is presented. Supporting the delivery of the right information, in the right format and in the right quantity motivates the search for better ways of handling document sub-components or fragments. Document fragment retrieval can be facilitated using modern computational technologies. This paper proposes a novel framework for information access utilising state-of-the-art computational technologies and introducing the use of multiple document structure views through decomposition schemes. The framework integrates document structure study, mark-up technologies, automated fragment extraction, faceted classification and a document navigation mechanism to achieve the target of retrieval of specific document fragments using precise, complex queries. These disparate elements have been brought together in an exploratory Engineering Document Content Management System (EDCMS). Using this, investigations using representative engineering documents have shown that information users can access and retrieve document content – at fragment level rather than at document level – both through data in a document and document metadata, through different perspectives and at different granularities, and simultaneously across multiple documents as well as within a single document.