Abstract
Learning is a lifelong process, which may not end at the transition from school to work. To exploit modern software systems used in design engineering, in order to increase efficiency and stay competitive, engineers have to keep on gaining knowledge during occupation. Anyhow, employees are usually not or only insufficiently trained, as no working time shall be lost. This paper demonstrates an opportunity to implement a learning-by-doing within the development process by the utilization of a Knowledge Based Engineering System (KBES). The user is supposed to be able to improve efficiency and quality in design engineering without the need of time-consuming trainings. Instead he/she is getting a short introduction (10 to 15 minutes), which can take place anytime during work. Therefore, product- and process-knowledge is saved within a knowledge-base and provided to the user in a way allowing him/her to use the system intuitively as he/she is guided through the process. As each step of the system may be reconstructed in the structure tree of the CA-system, the user understands the basic concepts in an implicit way. An experimental study is conducted to prove the effects of the KBES. The results clearly show that the efficiency and data-quality can be raised by the usage of such a system. Furthermore the study proves that there is a learning effect as the test persons could improve their results on a more complicated task after about four to six weeks past the introduction. The results may be explained with the Cognitive-Load-theory regarding the method of Worked-Out-Examples.
Highlights
The increasing globalization in the automotive industry is putting a high competitive pressure on companies
Employees working in a job for several years usually obtain no or only little time for learning activities, it might be needed for different reasons, like the just mentioned further development of software systems
Sweller and Cooper [24] analyzed learning through worked-out examples as well as learning though problem solving in the context of knowledge acquisition in algebra
Summary
The increasing globalization in the automotive industry is putting a high competitive pressure on companies. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate an approach how young professionals as well as employees with several years of experience can be enabled to exploit the full potential of software-systems without attending training classes on the expense of working time, by means of modern methods of virtual product engineering. A knowledge based engineering system (KBES) is introduced, which, amongst others, is a technique for design automation [6, 7], allowing the user to increase the efficiency and dataquality by utilizing integrated knowledge without demanding specific know-how (of the construction method / respective component). The term ‘tacit knowledge’ describes personal, context-specific knowledge, which is difficult to communicate, resulting from the experiences of the individual [10] To reach these goals, the represented KBES contains expert knowledge of the structural setup of a component as well as about each single construction step necessary in form of construction packages. The work is finished with a summary and an outlook
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