Integrating Knowledge Objects and e-Books to Support Six Roles in the Design Automation Life-Cycle

Knowledge objects are used to automate engineering processes in a flexible and scalable way. The focus of knowledge objects has been the automation of engineering design. However, in this paper we present a way to integrate knowledge objects into e-books so that formalized engineering knowledge can be read by any stakeholder and still be automatically applied by the system from the same file. The paper shows how different stakeholders throughout the life-cycle of a design automation system benefit from the knowledge object and e-book integration, how the integration is done and an example where the integration was applied. The example is a real example from industry.