FRAMEWORK FOR DISTRIBUTED DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE-BASED ENGINEERING SYSTEMS & OUTSOURCING IN CONTEXT OF PRODUCT DESIGN

Abstract

The physical products that are designed and manufactured have one or more components involved.
Every component has a geometry that is built with certain relevance to mathematics or heuristics. This
provides a way to document the mathematics, or rule behind building any geometry that a component
takes shape of. Usually such knowledge is preserved by way of documentation, or as a Knowledge
Based Engineering systems that operate with a Computer Aided Design (CAD) software or design
authoring tool. Capturing and maintaining the product knowledge is generally a documentation work.
To have the knowledge represented as ontology is desirable. This is due to the fact that it helps the
automated programs to create and validate different aspects of changes to the product and its building
blocks i.e. components. This research is carried out to formulate practice and framework to enable
distributed knowledge capturing, transforming the captured knowledge from informal knowledge to a
formal model, then use the formal model to develop the knowledge based engineering application.
The complete process can be recursive should there be a need to revise or evolve design. The research
has demonstrated that KBE applications can be built using modified ICARE form that can directly be
used to produce a program template. This challenges the previous researches where ICARE was
considered to be informal model. If ICARE form is recorded in XML or JSON format, it can be used to
generate the KBE program template. Since the data is recorded in XML/JSON git can be used to
record the information and maintain the versions. The generated code template uses open source CSG
library independent of design authoring tools. This code can be submitted to git, where all the changes
can be tracked and sententiously it allows distributed KBE application development using either
Github or GitLab. This satisfies the need of distributed KBE application development as mentioned in
few literature. Outsourcing can be enabled on top of the distributed KBE application development
with restrictions and security, and at the same time expertise of the domain experts due to open and
distributed nature of the development.