Innovative Production Machines and Systems Conference

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.