A PROPOSAL FOR KNOWLEDGE FORMALIZATION IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES

With respect to time-to-market and product development Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) solutions, which enable an automation of design tasks, can contribute to a significant reduction of development time. But to develop KBE solutions, not only engineering but also informatics competencies are required, which leads often to case-based solutions and in addition to costly extra effort, even in those cases where solutions only have to be adapted to a new context. This way, KBE becoMES too expensive for development teams, because they are only useful in a specific context and expensive to be managed. Enabling a broader usage context for KBE solutions, e.g. for different domains or in different projects, increases the efficiency of KBE. This paper aims to support designers to set-up and maintain KBE solutions, which address diverse product development tasks at once. Against this background, this paper identifies a need for a framework-independent solution to formalize design knowledge and derives corresponding objectives to be fulfilled by this solution. Further, an extension of an existing modelling language to become a new framework-independent standard for KBE projects is proposed.