Martti Mäntylä - Böcker

Computer aided design (CAD) technology plays a key role in advanced manufacturing environment. This work extends the concept of intelligent CAD to knowledge intensive CAD. The concept advocates that intensive life-cycle knowledge regarding products and design processes must be incorporated into the centre of the CAD architecture. Knowledge intensive CAD focuses on the systematization and sharing of knowledge across the life-cycle stages and organizational boundaries.

This text aims to extend the concept of intelligent CAD (computer-aided design) to the concept of "knowledge intensive engineering". The concept advocates that intensive life-cycle knowledge regarding products and design processes must be incorporated in the centre of the CAD architecture. It focuses on the systemization and sharing of knowledge across the life-cycle stages and organizational boundaries. The fields covered in this text include: computer-aided design and manufacture (CAD/CAM), engineering design research, artificial intelligence and knowledge-based systems, computer science, particularly distributed systems, and software engineering.

The book is the complete introduction and applications guide to this new technology. This book introduces the reader to features and gives an overview of geometric modeling techniques, discusses the conceptual development of features as modeling entities, illustrates the use of features for a variety of engineering design applications, and develops a set of broad functional requirements and addresses high level design issues.

This work is based on the premise that life-cycle knowledge regarding the product and design process must be incorporated in the centre of CAD architecture. It focuses on the systematization and sharing of knowledge of many types in many places and is concerned with knowledge management over product life-cycle. The topics covered here include: ontology; knowledge-intensive CAD (KIC); knowledge-intensive design (KID); and knowledge representation for KIC. The papers represent some of the proceedings of the Third Workshop on Knowledge Intensive CAD, sponsored by Working Group 5.2 of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held on December 1--4, 1998 in Tokyo, Japan.

Computer Aided Design (CAD) technology plays a key role in today's advanced manufacturing environment. To reduce the time to market, achieve zero defect quality the first time, and use available production and logistics resources effectively, product and design process knowledge covering the whole product life-cycle must be used throughout product design. Once generated, this intensive design knowledge should be made available to later life-cycle activities. Due to the increasing concern about global environmental issues and rapidly changing economical situation worldwide, design must exhibit high performance not only in quality and productivity, but also in life-cycle issues, including extended producer's liability. These goals require designers and engineers to use various kinds of design knowledge intensively during product design and to generate design information for use in later stages of the product life-cycle such as production, distribution, operation, maintenance, reclamation, and recycling. Therefore, future CAD systems must incorporate product and design process knowledge, which are not explicitly dealt with in the current systems, in their design tools and design object models.