Towards an Approach to Link Knowledge and Prediction in Product Design

Nowadays the knowledge reuse in product design is part of the main challenging issues in product lifecycle management, especially in the earlier stages. Indeed, over the last decade concurrent engineering principles have introduced numerous constraints to be well balanced and considered in product design regarding the whole product lifecycle. Designers need to be aware of their decisions and require assistance in their routine activities. As such, the authors propose to tackle this issue by introducing the concept of generating predictions (future) so as to activate knowledge (past) in the design process (present). Thus the fact of associating knowledge and prediction to ensure the appropriate knowledge reuse in product design by designers will require the capture of specific design context. A mechanical assembly as a case study is presented to illustrate the approach.