Knowledge Aware Engineering

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to introduce the concept of knowledge aware engineering (KAE) and explain how it can provide competitive advantage by ensuring all relevant "Design for ‘X’" disciplines are effectively infused into ship design and manufacturing processes. KAE provides "awareness" and delivery of relevant corporate technical memory to engineers and designers at the point of decision, enabling them to make quality decisions within a more efficient engineering process. With KAE, digital representations of Product and Manufacturing Processes are driven by, and infused with, the technical expertise, which continually evolves within engineering intensive firms. The Retained Know-How is accumulated, consolidated, and managed as an asset and delivered into context, ready to be reused in closed-loop decision support. As a result, passive "reference shelf"-type paradigms for managing and transferring the technical know-how, which rely on an individual to initiate searches, are avoided. Disparate repositories, tools, and documents that manage knowledge are unified into a single, visible, and engaging knowledge process. 1. Introduction Ship owners continue to face the challenges of escalating costs associated with designing, building, operating, and maintaining government and commercial assets over their full life cycle. At the same time, ships are becoming more complex with advancing technologies, increasing regulations and requirements, and restricting design strategies. Today, engineers must look at the entire system, beyond the typical functional design boundaries, and address an expanding, interrelating complexity of systems within systems, whose boundaries continue to broaden with unintended consequences and challenges. They must balance increased requirements to optimize the design across Systems Engineering disciplines, such as Design for Production, Design for Maintenance, Design for Quality, and Design for Safety, to name a few. For many of these Design for "X" specialties, the designer or engineer relies on design standards and input from subject matter experts often without a full understanding of the integration issues associated with these fields. During design, many of these are in conflict with each other, requiring a method for balancing these conflicts to increase the optimization of the design. This article showcases how other engineering intensive industries, such as aerospace and automotive industries, have leveraged proven methodologies to streamline the complex information flow and create knowledge-aware engineers to significantly improve the quality of design decisions and optimize the ship design across multiple objectives. If the designer does not get it correct, then many aspects of production and operations can be negatively impacted, costing money and time. This article will address the following:Current Ship Design and Shipbuilding ChallengesFlawed Approach to Knowledge Management (KM)Tenets of Knowledge Aware Engineering (KAE)KAE Maturity ModelsApplication of KAEImplementation of Best Practices