A STEP-based product knowledge model for One-of-a-Kind Production

One-of-a-Kind Production (OKP) is a new manufacturing paradigm for developing customized products with growing product variety in order to meet demands from individual customers in today's markets. Historical product knowledge is of great importance for OKP product development (OKPPD) in which data exchange and sharing is always required for collaborations of systems and integrations of PD activities. Many STEP-based knowledge modeling approaches have been developed. However, they have limitations on solving issues in OKPPD. This paper presents a STEP-based data model, and a four-step modeling method for supporting customized PD activities. A new EXPRESS data model with four submodels is also introduced, and four databases are established based on the proposed EXPRESS data model.