Applying Connectivism to Engineering Knowledge to Support the Automated Business

Maintaining products in an automated business includes digitalization and automation of engineering knowledge. When new products are to be developed, and introduced not only has the production processes be automated but also the knowledge regarding how the product should be constituted depending on customer requirements. One big challenge that companies of this kind face is how to make sure that the knowledge automated still can be understood by its stake holders during the development project and after product release and through the whole product life-cycle, which might last for decades. In this paper, we present a method to navigate and share vast amount of knowledge in businesses with high degree of automated engineering. The method is based on the connectivistic view of knowledge were network formation and filtering are two corner stones which implies the utilization of graph theory together with electronic publishing functionality.