Acquisition, Management, and Delivery of Engineering Knowledge

The DKMS is part of the answer to such questions as: "Why does it take so long to design/engineer/produce a product?"; "Why are so many of the mistakes of the past repeated?"; and "Why are we always the last to use the new ideas and technology being produced by our own research laboratories?" DKMS addresses the acquisition, management, and effective delivery of engineering knowledge, experience, and rationale. It is this life cycle engineering knowledge that must be marshaled in order to achieve the goals of concurrent engineering (CE) and total quality management (TQM).

DKMS research predicted the current software panacea of client-server type applications. The trend is to build small manageable modules that are easily and cheaply integrated into a tools framework that satisfies individual requirements rather than the monolithic software monsters with the "do-all" mentality of yesteryear. Almost every major player in the software market, as well as some hardware manufacturers, are touting a software architecture to integrate applications and data. The major drawback is that most of these attempts must design, engineer, and build these applications from scratch using this new technology. However, DKMS proposed an architecture that integrates existing legacy applications and data into an integrated homogeneous access format. While this level of integration can vary widely within DKMS, it was essential that DKMS offer an inexpensive and less risky way to experiment with CE by providing a legacy application integration path.

Design Knowledge Management is distinguished from general efforts in knowledge asset management by: 1) its focus on engineering knowledge, 2) its heterogeneous form and the distributed nature of such an engineering knowledge base, 3) its focus on shape as the primary indexing and organization mechanism of such engineering knowledge, and 4) its need to consider knowledge acquisition, application, and evolution as well as storage and retrieval.

Layered onto this platform was a development support environment including a powerful complement of both system software and knowledge engineering tools and utilities.

The five major components of the DKMS project are summarized in the following list.

	Integration Platform - operates in distributed heterogeneous environments to provide a realistic integration strategy that supports function and data integration while providing design artifact management facilities.
	Shaped-based Design Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Method - uses object descriptions in terms of their surfaces.
	High Productivity Computer-aided Design Tool Kit - acts as a library of Object-Oriented classes, methods, and functions that allow the creation of mechanical CAD/CAM/CAE applications and the addition of high-level CAD/CAM/CAE functionality to existing software systems.
	Container Object System - facilitates the evolution of life cycle artifact definitions and the flow of information between different life cycle activities concerning the life cycle artifacts.
	Model Development Support Environment - provides modelers with the framework for producing cost-effective models and leverages the productivity of model knowledge base expertise.

Design Development Support

The prototypes developed through this project comprised a software environment to support and control the design development process.

Additionally, the software environment was to be used to support life-cycle engineering knowledge representation; design knowledge acquisition, storage, and retrieval; and design knowledge and information integration services.