Capturing and reusing knowledge in engineering change management: A case of automobile development

The development of complex products, such as automobiles, involves engineering changes that frequently require redesigning or altering the products. Although it has been found that efficient management of knowledge and collaboration in engineering changes is crucial for the success of new product development, extant systems for engineering changes focus mainly on storing documents related to the engineering changes or simply automating the approval processes, while the knowledge that is generated from collaboration and decision-making processes may not be captured and managed easily. This consequently limits the use of the systems by the participants in engineering change processes. This paper describes a model for knowledge management and collaboration in engineering change processes, and based on the model, builds a prototype system that demonstrates the model’s strengths. We studied a major Korean automobile company to analyze the automobile industry’s unique requirements regarding engineering changes. We also developed domain ontologies from the case to facilitate knowledge sharing in the design process. For achieving efficient retrieval and reuse of past engineering changes, we used a case-based reasoning (CBR) with a concept-based similarity measure.