CASE STUDIES TO EXPLORE INDEXING ISSUES IN PRODUCT DESIGN TRACEABILITY FRAMEWORK

Little is currently understood about the requirements for engineering information traceability in product development environment, and there are few methods by which effective traceability can be ensured. First part of paper presents two case studies: an analysis of current traceability practice in automotive industry supplier, and an experiment in implementation of taxonomy based software tool for knowledge indexing in medium sized company. Based on findings from case studies, the further research seeks the answers how the ontology based approach to defining the context and associated set of indices could lead towards generation of navigable semantic network that will be able to fulfil complex traceability requirements in customizable environment. Proposed approach suggests the definition of the context for tracing by "extracting " the subsets of ontology. Elements of ontology subset are associated with information objects (design documentation) belonging to design episode which is to be traced. Tracing procedure is focused (but not exclusively) on events that are the part of the process of information object management in PLM system