Product Knowledge Management Tools, Methods, and Techniques for One-of-a-Kind Production

Abstract

As an extreme and special case of mass production, One-of-a-Kind Production (OKP) is a new manufacturing paradigm for producing customised products, based on satisfying the requirements of individual customers while maintaining the quality and efficiency of mass production. Proper management of product knowledge can shorten lead time of OKP Product Development (OKPPD) while maintain quality, compensate the loss of experts and make decisions as experts do, improve problem-solving capabilities in OKPPD, and so on. Owing to these benefits, product knowledge management (KM) and knowledge-based systems (KBSs) have received considerable attention and several instances such as knowledge reuse, indexing, retrieval, and exchange have been studied by researchers. However, there are still limitations and gaps in developing product knowledge management tools, methods and technologies for supporting OKPPD activities, which limit their feasibility of addressing OKP issues. The chief issues include knowledge exchange and sharing for collaborative OKP product development, knowledge modelling for preserving existing OKP product knowledge, retrieval for reusing previous knowledge, whereas, they are the essential concerns on which this research lays. This research explores the wide-ranging potential of KM techniques, tools, and KBSs in the pretext of managing OKP product knowledge. A KBS named OKP Knowledge Management System (OKPKMS) was developed to provide continuous knowledge support to customers and OKP companies in a dynamic environment. In the proposed knowledge management system, aforementioned KM issues in OKP are addressed. With more standardised and complete data/information/knowledge representation, previous product knowledge can be recorded, retrieved, and reused in both the conceptual design stage and the detailed design stage. Knowledge exchange and sharing between companies and industries is satisfied, which enhance flexibility and versatility of OKPKMS. Case studies have been carried out to prove the efficiency and industrial applicability of the proposed methods, techniques, and tools. The results show that they are capable of: 1) providing continuous knowledge for supporting knowledge exchange and sharing between teams and companies in collaborative product development; 2) partitioning CAD assembly models into modules automatically, based on component dependencies; 3) representing an OKP product family to support future modular design of OKP products; 4) fully interpreting CRs and retrieving cases for both the conceptual design stage and the detailed design stage, to support rapid OKPPD.