A Documentation and Information Assistant for Product Development Processes

Engineering processes are increasingly performed in teams by different distributed people including suppliers or external service providers. The engineering tasks are supported by a variety of IT tools like CAD, CAE, office or PDM systems. However these IT applications do not offer any assistance in documenting the engineering processes with all their complex background information like decisions, assumptions and trial iterations. As a consequence, only the final released results are stored fragmented in different proprietary engineering systems and data formats. The knowledge used in engineering processes exists only in the mind of the involved engineers and therefore cannot be used by other people for new similar tasks. The consequences are a poor design reuse and many avoidable errors, which cause higher product development costs and a lower product quality.