On Multidisciplinary Education Practices Inspired by Loosely-Coupled Architectures

A course of Knowledge-based engineering (KBE) deals with formalization of engineering knowledge to be used by computers to support automation in product design. For example, a KBE system can propose different variations of a product depending on knowledge it has and the objectives and/or constraints coming from a customer. The KBE system is supposed to (automatically) match customer expectations with suggested product design respecting the expectations. Within the KBE course, we teach how to create such KBE systems. Based on our experience acquired during the teaching of the course, we suggest that software architectures used to build KBE systems contain a good inspiration and proposal to organize the teaching of students with different backgrounds and skill-sets. Loosely-coupled service-oriented architectures used for developing among others the KBE systems can be a good reference for organizing and teaching multidisciplinary engineering courses. The focus of such courses understandably shifts towards interfaces and integration in-between various disciplines or modules. This creates an opportunity for students also to look to other disciplines and sometimes to find the same methods used in other disciplines, thus, also to learn better their own discipline thanks and through the comparison. This paper presents lessons learned from the KBE course. The paper proposes an approach for organizing multidisciplinary engineering courses to address different backgrounds of students facilitating learning for them. The article explores ways for bringing to the course and validating new knowledge acquired by some of course students sharing that knowledge with the rest of the course students and teachers. Also, the paper addresses Questions of course modularisation Including the following: i) How to define “good” boundaries for a module? ii) How to check which modules work best for given students? iii) How to maintain modules well and provide customizable paths? iv) What are the associated costs for trying to implement course modularisation?