Design rationale as part of corporate technical memory

In the era of knowledge-based economy and mass customization, knowledge has been regarded as a strategic factor to get competitive advantage. Thus knowledge management has attracted attention of both companies and academia. Corporate memory is the computer systems to support enterprise knowledge management activities (identification, acquisition, storage, usage, communication, and development). Design rationale is a kind of knowledge which affects the core competence of manufacturing enterprises. It explains why and how a product is designed as it is. Design rationale can be used to support design reuse, design communication and design verification. Thus the design quality and efficiency can be improved. In the paper, the capturing and providing of design rationale have been treated as part of knowledge management activities. We adopt an ontology-based approach to capture design rationale information and provide them actively with an intelligent agent integrated with the workflow management system. The ontologies for design rationale modeling are described and the methodology of capturing and providing design rationale actively is presented against the background of freight car design.