Towards the application of case based reasoning to decision-making in concurrent product development (concurrent engineering)

Abstract

This paper describes the development and application of case based reasoning (CBR) to provide decision support for project managers and engineers during the early phases of new product development in a concurrent engineering (CE) environment. The paper discusses the reasons for using CBR, focussing on issues such as case collection, maintenance, terminology, adaptation, and similarity; and how the final system could contribute towards achieving a CE conducive culture. The main issues in using CBR in a CE environment, that is characterised by ill defined and ill structured information during early phases of product development, are textual consistency of terminology, validity of case similarity, and the difficulty in automating case evaluation and adaptation. Additionally the paper concludes that using technology like CBR, which can be costly to develop and implement, requires the company to train considerably their managers and team members to document their experiences and knowledge in a manner with which the system can work with and team members can understand. There needs to a commitment to maintain and improve the knowledge base—a 'knowledge friendly' culture hence needs to be instilled for CBR tools to succeed.