Research on Technological Infrastructure for Supporting Product Design Reuse

Product design reuse is significant for enhancing organization′s comprehensive competitive advantage and realizing rapid product development. This paper discussed in detail the technological infrastructure for supporting the realization of product design reuse. Firstly, the technological requirements for product design reuse were presented based on product design reuse′s process framework; Secondly, the supportability of existing techniques for product design reuse such as CAD, PDM, AI, KM, and Web was studied deeply, and the technology gap was put forward; Thirdly, the integral technological infrastructure for enabling product design reuse based on artifact theory was proposed and its key techniques were presented, i.e. technique for structural representation of existing designs, technique for automatic acquisition of design knowledge, methodology for reuse oriented design and technique for establishing knowledge centric (not data centric) design warehouse.