A Proposed Method to Preserve Knowledge and Information by Use of Knowledge Enabled Engineering

Today’s automotive industry produces more new car models in a shorter time than ever before. Every car model comes in many different versions regarding number of doors, engine, transmission etc while being built on a platform strategy. This leads to a lot of different knowledge and information that needs to be tracked for the different components in addition to other information e.g. what function does design features have, why is this radius not smaller etc. Volvo Car Corporation (VCC) is in need of an effective method to save and present all this knowledge and information today. This paper describes a new method, to gather and save knowledge and information about car body parts also called body-in white, which was implemented in a demonstrator and tested and evaluated on VCC.Copyright © 2007 by ASME