Knowledge-Driven Automation

Reducing costs and bringing out products faster, to market while addressing

the increasing customer requirements are the two major challenges that

manufacturing companies face today. Manufacturers have standard product lines

and are continuously engaged in the process of engineering similar products, but

altered to suit the changing customer needs. Capturing the knowledge, adopting

the best practices and providing automation of design and manufacturing

processes will become the key technology enabling manufacturers to achieve

efficiency and profitability. Combining high end CAD systems with knowledge

based ones will allow manufacturers to automate their engineering and

manufacturing processes capturing the design rules, experience and expertise

residing in the organizations and leveraging it during new product introduction.

Challenges



Using customer requirements as input, the manufacturing companies are

engaged in the process of design, development and manufacturing of the product.

Manufacturers continue to invest on technology, consulting, and services to

improve the process, but the engineers continue to face many questions. To

overcome these challenges, manufacturers look up to the solution providers for

"intelligent" software that can make rule based decisions based on

knowledge and experience and can harness the disparate information and make it

readily available to automate the engineering process.

Knowledge Based Engineering



Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) is fundamentally about re-use. Ability to

take advantage of any experience, expertise and other information relevant to

each phase of the engineering life cycle of an end user product. Being able to

create and reference such knowledge bases and make them readily available, as an

aid to the engineering process constitutes KBE.

While such significant benefits can be achieved let us look at the major

barriers in implementing a KBE. There are two "knowledge approaches"

to product development. One is the Design approach and the other is the

Engineering approach. In addition to the differences in the approach of design

and engineering, implementing of KBE has few other barriers:

n KBE

applications are specialized and disjointed from MCAD systems



n KBE systems require
high level of expertise



n Knowledge
capturing is a complex process



n Although the
Knowledge may be documented, it is not always referred



n Investing in one
KBE system precludes reusing knowledge in others

In order for KBE to become central to the engineering process, it has to be

capable of being applied to all relevant disciplines.

The disciplines of Design, Analysis, and Manufacturing can all effectively

utilize KBE. This places on the technology the demands of flexibility, openness,

and customization and, of course, reusability. The technology must be deeply

integrated into the system processes and not just a simple add on, or interface

to an existing system; else key functionality, cannot be realized.

Knowledge Driven automation will automate many industry standard practices

and provide tools for sales, engineering, and manufacturing automation.

Overcoming the barriers and confirming to key feature requirements is essential

for a Knowledge based system to be widely adopted in the Industry.

The author is technical manager, EDS PLM Solutions

Aiyappan Ramamurthi