Design knowledge representation, retrieval and delivery for co-operative knowledge processing

The design, engineering, manufacture, and maintenance of high performance and high complexity systems have become one of the most important issues in the industrial world today. Facilitating these engineering activities depends on our ability to assemble and effectively deliver the life-cycle engineering knowledge. This paper deals with different problems of design using concurrent engineering, and with the application of information and knowledge management, with acquisition, representation, retrieval and delivery of design knowledge to the designers to reach co-operative knowledge processing. Car body shapes will be given as examples to shape based and feature based knowledge. Finally the support for interacting/integrated designer systems will be discussed