A methodology for eliciting expert knowledge in virtual engineering environments

Summary form only given. This research was initiated and applied in an area of engineering where tacit knowledge predominates; that of manual assembly planning. In this domain the evaluation and formalization of tacit knowledge is very difficult. Assembly planning is generally undertaken by planning ´experts´ who produce plans after studying design data in whatever form. Research at Heriot-Watt University has shown that immersive virtual reality (VR) offers significant potential for the interactive planning of mechanical assemblies. Using this system for gathering assembly intent, a knowledge elicitation methodology was developed in which expert assembly planners´ activities were logged while building a virtual assembly. This involved four main stages in its application: definition of the salient component attributes (repertory grid analysis); evaluation of attributes for given components (manual evaluation); recording expert assembly usage data (nonintrusive VR data logging); and generating rules relating the components to specific assembly methods (induction). This paper demonstrates how this novel nonintrusive knowledge acquisition methodology can be applied using immersive virtual environments; implying that, as globalizes technology becomes available, this may be a route to the formalization of company know-how