Knowledge-Based Engineering template instances update support

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to support the update of Knowledge-Based Engineering template instances. As result of this approach, engineers are provided with a sequence of documents, giving the order in which they have to be updated. The generation of the sequence is based on the dependencies. In order to be able to compute a sequence, information about templates, Computer-Aided Design models and their relations are required. Thus an ontology has been designed in order to provide a comprehensive knowledge representation about templates and assemblies, and to allow inference on this knowledge. This knowledge is then used by a ranking algorithm, which generates the sequence from modified templates, without involving a manual analysis of the models and their dependencies. This will prevent mistakes and save time as the analysis and choices are automatically computed. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.