Knowledge based engineering to support complex product design

In the current design process of complex products, such as aircraft, road vehicles, etc. (as well as their subsystems and related manufacturing hardware), there is a strong imbalance between the time absorbed by lengthy and repetitive activities and the limited time left for the investigation of multiple and innovative configurations, and what-if scenarios. From one side the market requires products of increasing complexity to be developed in a shorter time frame, from the other the time left to designers for the exploitation of their skills and creativity is drastically reducing. Innovation and sustained quality are seriously hampered. New technologies are required to facilitate modelling the multidisciplinary nature of complex products and investigating their performances in a reliable and time efficient manner, also when the design process requires the involvement of large and distributed teams of discipline experts. The concepts of lean engineering, originated in the area of production and manufacturing, need to be adopted also in the design process. Smarter tools able to embed experts’ engineering knowledge are required to reduce and automate as far as possible all the repetitive and non creative activities that hamper the design process. In this respect, Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) technology is able to provide designers with the required support. KBE technology stands at the cross point of diverse fundamental disciplines, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Computer Aided Design (CAD) and computer programming. Though these single contributing disciplines are widely represented in scientific literature, Knowledge Based Engineering is not yet. KBE has been for many years restricted domain of a few and highly competitive industries (aerospace and automotive in particular) and never turned into a subject of academic research. The very limited amount of available information, mainly in form of pamphlets from KBE vendors, has not stimulated the interest of the scientific community on KBE as a real engineering discipline. On the contrary, it has contributed generating the mixture of misunderstanding and skepticism that has marked the story of KBE at date.