In recent years, product knowledge has played increasingly significant roles in new product development process especially in the development of One-of-a-Kind products. Although knowledge-based systems (KBSs) have been proposed to support product development activities and new knowledge modelling methodologies have been developed, they are still far from complete. This area has become attractive to many researchers and as a result, many new knowledge-based systems, methods and tools have been developed. However, to the best of our knowledge, knowledge-based systems for product development have not been systematically reviewed, compared and summarized. This paper provides a comprehensive review on the recent development of KBS, methods and tools in supporting rapid product development. In the paper, the relevant technologies for modelling, managing and representing knowledge are investigated and reviewed systematically for better understanding their characteristics. The focus is placed on knowledge-based systems that support product development, and how product knowledge is identified, captured, represented and reused during the processes of One-of-a-Kind product development. The limitations and the future trend of KBS are presented in terms of how they can help One-of-a-Kind Production (OKP) companies.

Recent development of knowledge-based systems, methods and tools for One-of-a-Kind Production

Multi-granularity resource virtualization and sharing strategies in cloud manufacturing

Topological entities are always used as reference or operation objects in the feature modeling procedure. Hence, to achieve the integration of heterogeneous CAD systems, the corresponding topological entities must be found in the target CAD system to match the ones used in the source CAD system. In this paper, the topological entities' matching relations are first analyzed. Based on the analysis, a method for topological entity matching in the integration of heterogeneous CAD systems is proposed. The method consists of three key steps: information retrieval, information combination and topological entities' matching. First, the information of the topological entities used in the source CAD system is retrieved. Then, the retrieved information of those topological entities which satisfy the combination conditions is combined using the combination algorithm. Finally, for each topological entity obtained after the combination, the topological entities that satisfy the matching conditions are found using the matching algorithm in the target CAD system. The proposed method is evaluated by applying to a CAD data exchange system and a replicated heterogeneous co-design system The results demonstrate that our method works well for topological entity matching in the integration of heterogeneous CAD systems and improves the previous methods in both topological entities' combination and less-constrained concurrency control.

Ruijie Yan

Papers

A semantics-based approach for collaborative aircraft tooling design