W. Hills

Knowledge sharing and reuse for engineering design integration

Abstract Completion of complex engineering designs (e.g. the design of offshore oil platforms, ships, etc.) often involves a number of agents who have to share or reuse design models within a distributed environment. This article presents a knowledge sharing workbench which enables agents to share common domain knowledge, based on the problems which emerge in the design process. The workbench includes Application Programming Interfaces provided by expert system shells, an Object Request Broker, and a number of ontologies to facilitate the construction of new knowledge-based systems. In addition, the distributed knowledge acquisition tools generated by the workbench can maintain model consistency between agents when specification changes occur in any of the agents. A case study from the petrochemical industry is used to illustrate the use of workbench for the integration of a number of agents. This case study demonstrates that a process flow knowledge model in an offshore petrochemical plant, designed for operational purposes (e.g. fault diagnosis), can be reused to form part of a new knowledge-based system which generates the data for plant layout design.

A generic coordination approach applied to a manufacturing environment

This paper describes a generic coordination approach applied to the field of manufacturing engineering. The objective of the coordination mechanism with respect to this application is twofold. Firstly, it is shown that utilising the developed system can result in the efficient organisation of processes leading to a near optimum time taken to manufacture a number of artefacts. Secondly, successful operation of the system in this environment will demonstrate that the approach is generic in nature. The results already achieved using this system within a computational analysis environment supports this hypothesis.

An integrated agent-oriented approach to real-time operational design coordination

Within the engineering design community there is support for further research into the development of improved approaches to design management. Such research has lead to coordination being identified as an important and pervasive characteristic of many existing approaches (e.g., concurrent engineering and work-flow management). In this article, operational design coordination is proposed as the basis for an improved approach. This article also presents a novel integrated approach that incorporates the key elements of operational design coordination: coherence, communication, task management, resource management, schedule management, and real-time support. Through unifying these key elements, this approach provides an integrated means of managing design in a controlled and harmonious fashion. The approach also provides knowledge of the constituent techniques involved in operational design coordination, the interrelationships and dynamic interactions between them, and the knowledge used and maintained within and between them. The approach has been realized within an agent-oriented system called the Design Coordination System, which provides a systematic means of simultaneously coordinating operational management tasks and technical design tasks. To evaluate the approach, the system has been applied to an industrial case study involving the computational process of turbine blade design. This application has been shown to enable the structured undertaking of interrelated tasks by allocating and using resources of varying performance efficiency in an optimized fashion in accordance with dynamically derived schedules in a coherent, appropriate, and timely manner. This is achieved by managing tasks, their dependencies, and the information required to undertake them. In addition, the approach enables and sustains the continuous optimized use of resources by monitoring, forecasting, and disseminating resource performance efficiency. The approach facilitates dynamic scheduling and the subsequent enactment of the resulting schedules. Decision making for rescheduling is also incorporated within the approach such that it is only performed as and when appropriate. If rescheduling is performed, it is done so in parallel with task enactment such that resources continue to be utilized in an optimized manner.

Integrated Engineering Environments for Large Complex Products

An introduction is given to the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, along with a brief explana tion of the main focus towards large made-to-order products. Three key areas of research at the Centre, which have evolved as a result of collaboration with industrial partners from various sectors of industry, are identified as (1) decision support and optimisation, (2) de sign for lifecycle, and (3) design integration and co-ordination. A summary of the unique features of large made-to-order products is then presented, which includes the need for integration and co-ordination technologies. Thus, an overview of the existing integration and co ordination technologies is presented followed by a brief explanation of research in these areas at the Engineering Design Centre. A more detailed description is then presented regarding the co-ordination aspect of research being conducted at the Engineering De sign Centre, in collaboration with the CAD Centre at the University of Strathelyde. Concurrent Engineering is acknowledged as a strategy for improving the design process, however design co-ordination is viewed as a principal requirement for its successful implementation. That is, design co-ordination is proposed as being the key to a mechanism that is able to maximise and realise any potential opportunity of concurrency. Thus, an agent-oriented approach to co-ordination is presented, which incorporates various types of agents responsible for managing their respective activities. The co-ordinated approach, which is implemented within the Design Co-ordination System, in cludes features such as resource management and monitoring, dynamic scheduling, activity direction, task enactment, and information management. An application of the Design Co-ordination System, in conjunction with a robust concept exploration tool, shows that the computational design analysis involved in evaluating many design concepts can be performed more efficiently through a co-ordinated approach.

A robust design methodology suitable for application to one-off products

Robust design is an activity of fundamental importance when designing large, complex, one-off engineering products. Work is described which is concerned with the application of the theory of design of experiments and stochastic optimization methods to explore and optimize at the concept design stage. The discussion begins with a description of state-of-the-art stochastic techniques and their application to robust design. The content then focuses on a generic methodology which is capable of manipulating design algorithms that can be used to describe a design concept. An example is presented, demonstrating the use of the system for the robust design of a catamaran with respect to seakeeping.

An innovative approach to integrating engineering design: The Newcastle Engineering Design Centre

This paper describes how the innovative idea of an Engineering Design Centre (EDC) has been used to integrate academia, industry and government to build a highly successful internationally respected design research base. We restrict our description to the marine, offshore, civil and structural engineering areas and show how the research councils requirements for innovative design were met at the Newcastle EDC, the biggest and most successful of the United Kingdoms EDCs.

Generic research for design of made-to-order engineering products

Abstract The paper identifies those design research issues which, while being of particular interest to the made-to-order (MTO) sector, have a wide applicability. An overview of the Newcastle EDC research programme is provided and the research topics are set in the context of two themes— design strategies and design integrity. The process of adapting the results of research aimed at producing generic results in a form suitable for application to specific product types is illustrated by describing two projects in detail. Finally, the hetrogenous nature of the Newcastle EDC environment is described and particular references are made to industrial collaboration, technology transfer, training and education.

Real-time Co-ordinated Scheduling Using a Genetic Algorithm

Real-time co-ordination is an emerging approach to operational engineering management aimed at being more comprehensive and widely applicable than existing approaches. Schedule management is a key characteristic of operational co-ordination related to managing the planning and dynamic assignment of tasks to resources, and the enactment of the resulting schedules, throughout a changeable process. This paper presents the application of an agent-oriented system, called the Design Co-ordination System, to an industrial case study in order to demonstrate the appropriate use of a genetic algorithm for the purpose of real-time scheduling. The application demonstrates that real-time co-ordinated scheduling can provide significant reductions in time to complete the computational design process.

Using Technologies of Knowledge Sharing for Casting Production

This paper presents the application of the technologies of knowledge sharing and reuse to solve production problems within the metal casting industry. The NewSun Workbench, a knowledge sharing and reuse workbench, is introduced to facilitate the construction of a new knowledge base, and to simplify the interdependency between agents. Two expert system shells, Goldworks and KAPPA-PC, have been used to implement two Knowledge-Based Systems and one domain ontology in this exercise namely, a Process Control Expert System, a Fault Diagnosis Expert System, and a Casting Production Domain Ontology.