BOM-based design knowledge representation and reasoning for collaborative product development

Modern product development becomes increasingly collaborative and integrated, which raises the need for effectively and efficiently sharing and re-using design knowledge in a distributed and collaborative environment. To address this need, a framework is developed in this research to support design knowledge representation, retrieval, reasoning and fusion, which takes account of structural, functional and behavioral data, various design attributes and knowledge reasoning cases. Specifically, a multi-level knowledge representation based on the Base Object Model (BOM) is proposed to enable knowledge sharing using Web services technologies. On this basis, a multi-level knowledge reuse method is developed to support the retrieval, matching and assembly of knowledge records. Due to the tree structure of BOM, both depth-first and breadth-first searching strategies are employed in the retrieval algorithm while a novel measure is proposed to evaluate similarity. Moreover, a method based on the D-S evidence theory is developed to enable knowledge fusion and thus support effective decision-making. The framework has been implemented and integrated into an HLA-based simulation platform on which the development of a missile simulation example is conducted. It is demonstrated in the case study that the proposed framework and methods are useful and effective for design knowledge representation and reuse.