Knowledge-aided engineering environment for design and manufacturing

The development of a knowledge-aided engineering environment, an emerging concept that aims to exploit the commonality and the adaptability of the knowledge underlying design and manufacturing, is presented. The following objectives are critical for achieving this end: (1) the definition of an integrated set of conceptual and physical data models that can support the unique requirements of the engineering and manufacturing environments and also promote the sharing of common knowledge; (2) the production of a mechanism for the automatic generation of such models and their accompanying software for specific application domains; (3) the creation of a strategy for knowledge-driven dialogue management; and (4) the specification of a rule base that supports the integration of the dialogue manager and the data model generator into a functional prototype. An example illustrating the KAD/KAM (knowledge-aided design/knowledge-aided manufacturing) environment is presented.<>