Towards the application of case based reasoning to decision-making in concurrent product development (concurrent engineering)

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Abstract

This paper describes the development and application of case based reasoning (CBR) to provide decision support for project managers and engineers during the early phases of new product development in a concurrent engineering (CE) environment. The paper discusses the reasons for using CBR, focussing on issues such as case collection, maintenance, terminology, adaptation, and similarity; and how the final system could contribute towards achieving a CE conducive culture. The main issues in using CBR in a CE environment, that is characterised by ill defined and ill structured information during early phases of product development, are textual consistency of terminology, validity of case similarity, and the difficulty in automating case evaluation and adaptation. Additionally the paper concludes that using technology like CBR, which can be costly to develop and implement, requires the company to train considerably their managers and team members to document their experiences and knowledge in a manner with which the system can work with and team members can understand. There needs to a commitment to maintain and improve the knowledge base—a ‘knowledge friendly’ culture hence needs to be instilled for CBR tools to succeed.

Section snippets

Background (concurrent engineering)

New product development (NPD), is an interdisciplinary activity requiring contributions from nearly all the functions of a firm, whether it is an upgrade/improvement of an existing product or a new concept either to the company or the market. Traditionally NPD has been viewed as an organisational activity, which was the result of various functional activities performed in stages from concept development to product delivery. The sequential operation of these functional stages resulted in long

The solution—choice of CBR

The explicit request for reuse of knowledge and experience called for the application of case based reasoning (CBR). CBR is a computer technique, which combines the knowledge based support philosophy with a simulation of human reasoning when past experience is used, i.e. mentally searching for similar situations happened in the past and reusing the experience gained in those situations [8]. In the same way, in CBR, the knowledge cases are structured and stored in a database, which the user

The development process—overview

A CBR implementation, in any domain, requires a detailed analysis of the environment, as it is strongly related to the type of problems being solved or decisions being supported. For this reason, in the CODESCO project, the academic partners started by looking at the specific product development context of each company. User requirements were developed into system functional requirements through interviews, questionnaires and focussed workshops with project managers, design/development

Application benefits

The reason for applying a CBR decision support system was to improve the CE process or practices by improving the decision-making process. The success of CE lies in the achievement of collaboration between different team members. We have developed a decision support tool that provides factual information in a structured and context relevant format, and which encourages human intervention and discourse. This would enable the team to move towards a more CE conducive culture. This is achieved by

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