Knowledge-based support of rapid product development

The benefits of Rapid Prototyping technologies can be applied efficiently only when they are embedded in an entire product development process. Rapid Product Development (RPD)-an iterative process involving manufacturing and evaluation of rapid prototypes-is mostly characterized by decentralized design teams cooperating on a high degree of process parallelism. In practice, RPD processes often lack mechanisms to combine design results of different designers, and, therefore, information management and the integration of interdisciplinary knowledge are some of the most central problems in the RPD process. An approach for supporting the entire RPD process consists of providing designers with a common knowledge base that represents all information relevant in RPD. Such a knowledge base helps to establish a common understanding and support the communication and cooperation of design teams. A requirement analysis of engineering databases shows that conventional database concepts do not support the required functionality of this application domain sufficiently. Here, advanced database features, such as an advanced transaction concept or active modelling primitives representing the semantics of product data, are needed. This paper presents a knowledge database called the Active Semantic Network. The Active Semantic Network has been developed to face the special tasks of designers working in RPD processes.