Retrieving Functional Knowledge from Existing Products for Reuse

Functional modeling has been widely researched in the past decades and is considered to be effective in assisting concept design. However, construction of substantial design repository with abundant knowledge maintenance is still a problem. In this paper, we propose a model and approach for retrieve functional knowledge from existing products. First, we propose the functional knowledge retrieval model. The concept of F-S pair is introduced as functional knowledge carrier. Second, we present the approach with detailed steps based on our model and an example that capturing functional knowledge from a hydraulic jack to demonstrate our method is demonstrated. Specially, it is an iterative process for exploring all interesting functional knowledge that from high level to low level hierarchies in a product.