Managing Functional and Ontological Knowledge in the Design of Complex Mechanical Objects

This paper presents a conceptual framework for the development of Knowledge Management (KM) systems to support experts in complex design activities. Designing a complex object is not simple, since it is concerned not only with problem solving issues, but also with the needs for capturing and managing the core knowledge involved in it. A complex object is typically made of a huge number of parts that are put together according to a first set of constraints (i.e. the dynamic knowledge or functional knowledge), dependable on the functional properties it must satisfy, and a second set of rules, dependable on what the expert thinks abut the problem and how he/she would represent it (i.e. the static knowledge or ontological knowledge). The paper introduces how to unify both types of knowledge, exploiting the SA-Nets formalism to capture the dynamic knowledge and an ontological approach to represent static knowledge.