Innovative Production Machines and Systems Conference

Best Practice, representing value-creating processes, has been understood in terms of how teams learn, internalize, apply and improve experiential knowledge within an enterprise collaboration framework. In mature markets firms are ependent on knowledge development processes making best practice more efficient and effective for the purpose of ompetitiveness, without being copied by competitors. However, for the global firm to leverage best practice, ICT (Information and Communication Technology) needs to be applied both toward developing and transferring such knowledge. Thus, we need to understand if best practice can be developed through the supported of ICT-represented knowledge, and if so, how does it lead to best practice being improved/changed. We are reporting from research in progress. In our preliminary analysis we have discovered that, given certain organizational conditions, ICT-supported best practice representation may enhance best practice development.

The following paper discusses technologies and approaches for the optimisation of the product development and provides an outlook on future developments for an intelligent IT support for the design engineer. After highlighting the importance of the product design phase within the PLC and current application of PLM concepts and systems in the manufacturing industry, the paper concentrates on the integration of Knowledge Management techniques to the product development process. Additionally, the application of Requirement Engineering is introduced here to enable the specification of an optimised knowledge base. The implementation of these approaches is demonstrated on the basis of the European research projects PRIME and KARE, which feature both the concept of model-based data representation. Derived from their outcome, the future development of  knowledge-based and requirements-driven intelligent software agents is motivated for a supported and integrated design process.