Using Knowledge Based Engineering To Support The Design Of Smart Products

If products are no longer considered as being mere physical devices, it has to be analyzed if KBE (Knowledge based Engineering) approaches can be adapted or if KBE approaches become obsolete for the design of the so called "smart products". As a sub domain of Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE), Design Automation (DA) builds on the idea of deriving the physical design of a product automatically from codified, product related engineering knowledge. The authors believe that, by paying special attention to the potential interaction of products with different sorts of information and content, DA approaches can even play a major role for the development of smart products. Thus this paper aims to provide a concept for an enhancement of DA. Instead of case based and locally implemented solutions, the concept relies on a central knowledge-based system in order to process the smart layer on top of the geometrical design. The proposed system is be grounded upon an ontology in order to represent the physical and the virtual domain synchronously. Following this approach, different kinds of product development applications can rely on one central knowledge-base.