Design for manufacturing methods and applications using knowledge engineering

Abstract: As companies strive to develop artefacts intended for services instead of traditional sell-off, new challenges in the product development process arise to promote continuous improvement and increasing market profits. This creates a focus on product life-cycle components as companies then make life-cycle commitments, where they are responsible for the function availability during the extent of the life-cycle, i.e. functional products. One of these life-cycle components is manufacturing; therefore, companies search for new approaches of success during manufacturability evaluation already in engineering design. Efforts have been done to support early engineering design, as this phase sets constraints and opportunities for manufacturing. These efforts have turned into design methods and guidelines for manufacturing. A further step to improve early design is to reuse results and use experience from earlier projects. However, because results and experiences created during project work are often not documented for reuse, only remembered by some people, there is a need for design support tools. Knowledge engineering (KE) is a methodology for creating knowledge-based systems, e.g. systems that enable reuse of earlier results and make available both explicit and tacit corporate knowledge, enabling the automated generation and evaluation of new engineering design solutions during early product development. There are a variety of KE-approaches, such as knowledge-based engineering, case-based reasoning and programming, which have been used in research to develop design for manufacturing methods and tools. There is an opportunity for research where several approaches and their interdependencies, to create a transparent picture of how KE can be used to support engineering design, are investigated. The aim of the research presented in this thesis is to create new methods for design for manufacturing, by using several approaches of KE, and find the beneficial and less beneficial aspects of these methods in comparison to each other and earlier research. This thesis presents methods and applications for design for manufacturing using KE. The methods employ KE in several ways, namely rule-based, rule-, programming- and finite element analysis (FEA)-based, and rule- and plan-based, which are tested and compared with each other. Results show that KE can be used to generate information about manufacturing in several ways. The rule-based way is suitable for supporting life-cycle commitments, as design and manufacturing can be integrated with maintenance and performance predictions during early design, though limited to the firing of production rules. The rule-, programming- and FEA-based way can be used to integrate computer-aided design tools and virtual manufacturing for non-linear stress and displacement analysis. This way may also bridge the gap between designers and computational experts, even though this method requires a larger effort to program than the rule-based. The rule- and plan-based way can enable design for manufacturing in two fashions - based on earlier manufacturing plans and based on rules. Because earlier manufacturing plans, together with programming algorithms, can handle knowledge that may be more intricate to capture as rules, as opposed to the time demanding routine work that is often automated by means of rules, several opportunities for designing for manufacturing exist.