Abstract
In the highly competitive engineering industry, product innovations are created with the help of a product lifecycle management (PLM) tool chain. In order to support fast-paced product development, a major company goal is the reuse of product designs and product descriptions. Due to the product’s complexity, the design of a product not only consists of geometry data but also of valuable engineering knowledge that is created during the various PLM phases. The need to preserve such intellectual capital leads engineering companies to introduce knowledge management and archiving their machine-readable formal representation. However, archived knowledge is in danger of becoming unusable since it is very likely that knowledge semantics and knowledge representation will evolve over long time periods, for example during the 50 operational years of some products. Knowledge evolution and knowledge representation technology changes are crucial issues since a reuse of the archived product information can only be ensured if its rationale and additional knowledge are interpretable with future software and technologies. Therefore, in order to reuse design data fully, knowledge about the design must also be migrated to be interoperable with future design systems and knowledge representation methods. This paper identifies problems, issues, requirements, challenges and solutions that arise while tackling the long-term preservation of engineering knowledge.
Highlights
Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) systems manage the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception through design and manufacturing to service and disposal
Information Architecture Based on these requirements, we propose the following architecture for the information models of a PLM system which handle all PLM data and design knowledge in the same way; we regard them as data which are based on a specific model
Engineering knowledge that is appropriate for archiving is created during several product lifecycle phases
Summary
Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) systems manage the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception through design and manufacturing to service and disposal. PLM systems integrate people, data, processes and systems and provide a product information backbone for companies. The usage of PLM systems is common in industries like electrical or mechanical engineering. In such industries, newly created products tend to be complex and are developed and serviced in an international and collaborative environment. Products are developed by a great number of engineers that use knowledge-intensive processes. Engineering Knowledge the debate about the data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy is still ongoing (Fricke, 2009), we regard knowledge as personal and public know-how and know-that. A classification of such engineering knowledge is performed by Ahmed (2007). The following list gives examples of engineering knowledge:
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
