Knowledge transfer methods for expressing product design information and organization

Abstract

Product design information represents not only the carrier of design but also the significant digital assets of businesses. At present, manufacturing is facing an environment with mass, fragmented, real-time, and multi-scene digital information in the process of product design. To improve the availability of information resources and the efficiency of information reuse as well as to achieve the sharing of production means, the expression of product design information should be optimized in information storage. In addition, a new ecosystem should be built for information increments, making the participants of every link in the process of product design become the contributors of information. Considering the unique aspects of design group individuals, this paper builds a knowledge transfer model that capitalizes on hypercycle theory and proposes the concept of modularizing information carriers and information processing methods. It comprehensively analyses the expression methodology and organizational attributes of product design information and proposes a knowledge transfer carrier model constructed via discretized fragmented semantic information, which is concretely implemented as informative product file labelling. By combining personnel, information carriers and information dissemination networks, this paper provides the functionality and architecture needed to build an information processing platform using social networking software (SNS). Some application scenarios are described by using this processing method for production information; the development process for an automotive air filter is shown as an example. The results of this study suggest that the proposed method is conducive to improving the expressions of product design information and the interactions among participants. The simplicity of the labelling process and the intuitive label content greatly reduce the usability threshold and the losses caused by information gaps, creating a precondition for many types of people to fully participate in the product design information knowledge transfer cycle.