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