A Novel Method for Acquiring Engineering-Oriented Operational Empirical Knowledge

The operational knowledge of skilled technicians gained from years of experience is invaluable for an enterprise. Possession of such knowledge will facilitate an enterprise sharing technician’s know-how and training of new employees effectively. However, until now there is rare efficient quantitative method to obtain this kind of tacit knowledge. In this paper we propose a concept of engineering-oriented operational empirical knowledge (OEK) to describe this kind of knowledge and design a framework to acquire OEK from skilled technician’s operations. The framework integrates motion analysis, motion elicitation, and intent analysis. The modular arrangement of predetermined time standards (MODAPTS) is used to divide the technician’s operational process into basic motion elements; and the variable precision rough set (VPRS) algorithm is used to extract the technician’s OEK content, which combined with the technician’s intent elicited via interview; the completed OEK is obtained. At the end of our study, an engineering case is used to validate the feasibility of the proposed method, which shows that satisfactory results have been reached for the study.