Engineering knowledge extraction for semantic interoperability between CAD, KBE and PLM systems

Abstract

For the deployment of both Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) approaches, product and process engineering knowledge needs to be identified, acquired, formalized, processed and reused. While knowledge acquisition is still a bottleneck process, the formalized engineering knowledge is still too often encapsulated in CAD models and in KBE systems developed in vendor-specific environments. To address this issue, this paper introduces a possible solution enabling the enrichment of a CAD-KBE-PLM integration schema that provides a standardized and neutral representation of engineering knowledge for further reuse across heterogeneous CAD, KBE and PLM systems. To enrich this schema, the proposed solution combines the use of a Multi-CAD API library – which allows platform-independent and automatic extraction of engineering knowledge from CAD models into an XML-based representation – and a Knowledge Acquisition and Formalization Assistant (KAFA) which assist domain experts to formalize their procedural knowledge.