Increasing Predictability and Sharing Tacit Knowledge in Electronic Design

The chapter reports on the use of knowledge process learning, articulation and sharing technologies developed in the ACTIVE project for increasing the performance and decreasing the ramp-up efforts of knowledge workers in engineering design projects. Attention is paid to the specific characteristics of knowledge processes in microelectronic engineering design, of which one of the most important is the absence of predefined workflows. Instead of following rigid working patterns, the knowledge workers exploit their tacit knowledge and experience for finding the most productive way through the “terrain” of the possible process continuations. The knowledge workers in this domain are design project managers, designers, and design support engineers. Process knowledge is mined from distributed heterogeneous datasets, fused, and used for visualizing the design project plan and execution information. The visualization suggests optimized performance, points to the bottlenecks in executions, and fosters collaboration in development teams. A project navigation paradigm is developed that helps knowledge workers more easily accomplish their work. We describe the software prototype architecture and implementation. Validation results are presented which indicate that the solution is helpful in providing expert assistance to design project managers performing their typical tasks of project planning and execution