Study on engineering knowledge management in collaborative product design

Successful product design depends on the ability to effectively manage and share engineering knowledge and experience throughout the entire development process. Thus, this paper presents a distributed engineering knowledge management approach for the practice of collaborative product design. Firstly, by combining meta-knowledge with XML based topic maps (XTM), a heterogeneous knowledge integration model in collaborative product design is proposed. Then, based on the knowledge integration model and characteristics of collaboration product design, a knowledge management-oriented collaborative work process model is built and a knowledge management framework in collaborative design is developed. Finally, a knowledge management system in collaborative design is constructed.