M.Ing. (Engineering Management) / The growing need for customized solutions and faster product delivery obliges the product development industry to develop new strategies that can enable the rapid and flexible design of products. Several design approaches have been developed to address this issue: one such is Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE), which is a design technique that enables the automation of the design process. This approach consists of using computational intelligence to capture the design rules related to a product family in order to generate automatically customized designs adapted to particular customer requirements. Knowledge-Based Engineering is also used to facilitate the performance of design evaluation activities such as finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as part of multi-disciplinary design optimization (MDO). The application of this approach led to impressive results mostly in the automotive and aeronautical industry. Owing to this method, some companies manage to reduce the duration of the design process by 90%. Despite the excellent results obtained through the use of Knowledge-Based Engineering, there are still very few companies that make use of this approach in their design process. The review of the relevant literature showed that the lack of a standard easy-to-use methodology of implementation is one of the major obstacles to the expansion of Knowledge-Based Engineering. The knowledge processing phase constitutes one of the main challenges of the KBE implementation process. This phase consists of extracting and documenting the knowledge embedded in the design team in order to convert it in a programming code. Available methodologies such as MOKA and KNOMAD do not seem to provide easy-to-use methods to represent the design knowledge in a form that makes it easy to be programmed. The lack of a preliminary stage that justifies the adequacy of KBE for a particular design process is also an important gap identified in the literature.This dissertation discusses a detailed method that addresses issues related to knowledge processing and suitability analysis in KBE implementation. The knowledge processing method suggested is based on the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) which is used widely in the system engineering approach and consists of a very logical classification of the design knowledge. The strength of this method lies in its ability to represent the design knowledge in a form that makes it understandable for both engineers and programmers. Appropriate representation of this sort shortens the duration of the knowledge processing and facilitates the knowledge programming phase. Regarding the rationale for choosing of KBE, a detailed suitability assessment method is proposed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uj/uj:7543 |
| Date | 27 May 2013 |
| Creators | Mvudi, Yannick |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | University of Johannesburg |
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