Study on product knowledge management for product development

In order to satisfy the needs for acquisition and reuse of product knowledge during the modern product development processes, a framework of product knowledge management was proposed. It contains five main components: design repository, OLAP, knowledge reduction, CBR system, and machine learning. Design repository is responsible for organizing various kinds of knowledge from different data sources by building a subject-oriented and multi-dimensional knowledge model. Users and Designers can input inquiries into the CBR system. Then OLAP drills down and finds the similar cases. Knowledge reduction techniques reduce the retrieved similar cases from OLAP, which improves the efficiency of the CBR system. Machine Learning can capture new knowledge to complement design repository. Finally, the proposed approach is demonstrated through a real application of tied bill machines.