A Knowledge Based Approach to Facilitate Enginering Design
Author(s)
Seshasai, Satwik; Gupta, Amar![Thumbnail](/bitstream/handle/1721.1/1767/A%20Knowledge%20Based%20Approach%20to%20Facilitate%20Enginering%20Desing%204381-02.pdf.jpg?sequence=4&isAllowed=y)
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Show full item recordAbstract
This paper presents a knowledge-based approach to facilitate the engineering design
process relating to spacecrafts. Because the design evolves over a long time and typically
involves individuals working at different locations and frequently for different
organizations, the degree of collaboration across temporal and spatial boundaries plays a
major role in determining the aggregate time and cost involved in each instance of
spacecraft design. A major aspect of such collaboration is the issue of communications –
the ability to clearly and efficiently explicate and record the detailed needs of every
stakeholder in the process, as well as the major design decisions and the rationale behind
these decisions. The approach described in this paper provides a framework for
facilitating the decision-making process in engineering design, by eliciting and capturing
the goals and requirements of every stakeholder in the design process through utility and
expense functions. An interactive system has been designed that incorporates a four
faceted knowledge-based framework of knowledge acquisition, knowledge discovery,
knowledge management and knowledge dissemination to provide designers and
stakeholders with the capability to develop an evolving knowledge repository about all
aspects of the design process. This interactive system includes the ability to capture
succeeding versions of the detailed design, with zero or minimal human involvement; the
capability is provided by a set of algorithms collectively named as SSPARCy. A
complimentary tool, called MIST, facilitates the Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration
process by enabling stakeholders to express their goals and preferences in a formalized
manner. The combination of MIST and SSPARCy paradigms enables one to transform
crucial applications that are today contingent on geographical proximity to occur with
equal or superior effectiveness in a virtual world. While this paper analyzes a situation
involving engineering design of spacecrafts, the proposed knowledge-based approach can
be readily adopted to facilitate other applications that involve sustained collaboration
across geographic and corporate boundarie
Date issued
2002-10-23Series/Report no.
MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper;4381-02
Keywords
Knowledge-Based Appoach, Enginering, Design