Development of a methodology for knowledge discovery in engineering design

Knowledge-based engineering (KBE) represents a significant opportunity for firms to: 1) improve efficiency through automation, knowledge capture, and reuse; 2) reduce knowledge-loss resulting from knowledge-worker attrition; and 3) enable revenue growth through appropriate infrastructure investments. A specific challenge to enabling fluid KBE practice in industry is the lack of a one-to-one agreement between the "as-prescribed" design processes (information/knowledge flows and transformation principles) and the "as-implemented" processes that emerge. Understanding these deviations as emergent behavior is critical to implementing processes that optimizes knowledge infrastructure. This work presents on-going work to develop a formal mapping procedure capable of systematically capturing processes as they are executed on a day-to-day basis, for comparison with formal documented processes. The approach intends to produce a graph of the as-prescribed/as-implemented differences that can be used to identify inefficiencies (unnecessary iteration, opportunities for parallelism, alternate design sequences) in digitally executed, knowledge-driven design processes.