A novel method for adaptive knowledge map construction in the aircraft development

Aircraft is a typical transportation facility and its development need to refer to the existing knowledge. With the rapid increase of knowledge, a knowledge map may deliver excess knowledge to users that they cannot manage at once, thereby causing the problem of knowledge overload. Hence, a novel method for adaptive knowledge map construction was proposed to solve this problem. First, the knowledge was semantically annotated and stored with the domain ontology and a knowledge model that integrates context. Then, user requirement was described by the context of product design, and knowledge nodes that met users’ requirement could be extracted from the knowledge retrieval technology on the basis of context similarity. Finally, the connection between knowledge nodes was constructed with a composite connection model, and the knowledge map was visualized using a hierarchical approach. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the constructed knowledge map was applied in an airplane wing design to assist users in browsing the knowledge base. Results indicate that the proposed method can change the displayed contents according to user requirement and identify the displayed knowledge nodes at a highly acceptable level, the constructed knowledge map can guide users efficiently, and the knowledge overload can be reduced significantly.