Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The Potential Failure Modes and Effects Analysis in Manufacturing and Assembly Processes (PFMEA) represents an important preventive method for quality assurance, in which several specialists are involved in the investigation of all the causes and effects related to all possible failure mode of a manufacturing process, still in the initial phases of its development. Thus, the decisions based on the severity levels of effects and on the probabilities of occurrence and detection of the failure modes can be planned and prioritized. The result of this activity consists of a valuable source of knowledge about the manufacturing processes. However, this knowledge is hardly reusable in intelligent retrieval systems, because in general all related information is acquired in the form of natural language and it is not semantically organized, and therefore its meaning depends on the understanding of the specialists involved in the production chain. In this context, this paper describes the development and implementation of a formal ontology based on description logic (DL) for the knowledge representation in the domain of PFMEA, which fundamentally intends to allow the computational inference and ontology-based knowledge retrieval as support to the activities of organizational knowledge in manufacturing environments with distributed resources.

Nowadays, designers usually interact with teams of distributed stakeholders using information and communication technology, aiming time/cost reductions and quality improvement. However, a lack in collaboration and knowledge management support mechanisms persists, especially in the product pre-development. Best practices for product pre-development are still ill-defined because information available for designers in this phase are still instable and too abstract. Portfolio management highlights reasons, restrictions, tendencies and impacts, using competitive intelligence concepts insights on a knowledge management perspective, in order to classify project proposals in accordance with the organizational strategy. An agreement about what is really important to organizational strategy, along with a right team appointment, can contribute to empower portfolio management decisions. To achieve such an agreement, it is necessary to understand the different viewpoints in the negotiation process, to reduce impositions and the dependency from senior professionals with consecrated skills. The proposed architecture can contribute to portfolio management commitment, increasing the rate of right decisions and the support for these decisions, enabling coherence on similar situations. A collaborative product pre-development can extend the organizational capacity to obtain competitive advantages, because a consistent pre-development results in minor deviation on subsequent phases of the new product development.

Concurrent engineering depends on clear communication between all members of the development process. As that communication becomes more and more complex, the quality of the standards used to move and understand that information likewise becomes more and more important. If the standard is incomplete, redundant, or ambiguous, most of the expected benefits are lost. In order to improve data exchange standards, explicit data models are required. However, creating those data models is a process that requires collaboration between domain experts. What is needed is a solution that encourages interaction without requiring a high level of data modeling expertise. Focus is a software tool designed to provide such an environment. It is a distributed design and conferencing application which uses augmented reality to allow domain experts to come together in real time for data modeling. By developing Focus, we hope to allow domain experts to create data models without first having to learn complex UML modeling programs. Because of the networked nature of Focus, it is easier to ensure the participation of the best domain experts regardless of location. This paper details the development, features, and expected benefits of Focus in a collaborative engineering environment.

In this paper we present a pedagogical game intended to simulate the collaborative design activities of mechanical products as part of the formation programme for future engineers. This game is based on the adaptation of the Delta Design game developed at M.I.T. The principle of the game is to co-imagine a space shuttle built in Lego® blocks with functions and rules assigned for several students. The software used (MLCad) provides for a shared and distributed use of the game. The core objective is to create a situation that brings the students together in a way that encourages them to experiment with different designs by making compromises, overcoming conflicts, and working within the constraints of the game. The underlying theory of this model is that by encouraging collaboration among each other when addressing the different obstacles and variables encountered, the students will have a better understanding of their own behaviour and the behaviour of other members. Thus, the students will intuitively contemplate the diverse and beneficial methods of collaboration required for practices between trades.

In collaborative design process, multidisciplinary virtual teams’ integration — involving exchange and sharing of knowledge and expertise — frequently generate a lot of conflicting situations. Different experts’ point of views and perspectives, in addition to several ways of communicating and collaborating in knowledge level, make all this process very hard to tackle. Aiming to minimize the appearance of early design conflicts and to solve the rest of them, this paper presents an approach to represent knowledge in design process based on Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL is structured to be a major formalism for the design and dissemination of ontology information. The use of OWL reasoning is intended to be a consistent way to verify the information given by several experts, trying to avoid redundancies, contradictions and misunderstoods. A prototype, based on the Function-Behavior-Structure design framework, that uses OWL to input data, was built up to validate this approach.

Product design is currently a subject that involves various kinds of knowledge. In order to develop products that are successful in the market it is necessary to involve people from different areas of the production cycle, such as: marketing, assembly, processing, sales, among others, in addition to consideration of clients’ wishes. To address these issues in the development of a product, a design method that uses tools based on the principles of simultaneous engineering needs to be used. Interface design of a product should consider information from the areas mentioned as well. In this way, development of a method for interface design in the initial phases of product design could be an element of effective use of Simultaneous Engineering in the design. The purpose of this paper is to describe how the development of a method for interface design can contribute to the establishment of a Simultaneous Engineering environment in the initial phases of product design. To accomplish this, it is necessary to use techniques such as DFA, DFM, and FMEA in those stages of the design.

An ontology of civil engineering services is created by combining knowledge of the phases of the life cycle of an engineering design product, the steps in the phases in an engineering service and the technical, technological, scientific, social, economic, organizational and legal aspects associated with an engineering service. The documents containing information and knowledge related to projects are tagged using ontological concepts. The annotated documents are stored in an XML-Database, and constitute an organizational memory that enables access to, and reuse of information and knowledge. A case study of an engineering service is used to illustrate the proposed approach to the construction of the organizational memory.

We consider seven knowledge components that constitute the pillars for building a document-based organizational memory for engineering curriculum design: epistemology, pedagogy, Philosophy, universal knowledge, internal academic knowledge, external academic knowledge and extra-academic knowledge. We present domain ontology for guiding access to, and management and retrieval of knowledge and information stored in annotated documents. The curriculum oriented organizational memory supports the construction, evaluation and continuous evolution of engineering curricula. The integration of knowledge and information for continuous curricular transformation is illustrated with a case study of an informatics curriculum.

This paper describes the development of an ontology for the AEC/FM projects’ documentation management that allows the classification of the documents along the lifecycle of AEC/FM projects. This ontology is aimed at reducing the interoperability and information exchange problems, inherent nowadays in AEC/FM projects, establishing a hierarchical structure of the different areas that conform the lifecycle of AEC/FM projects and an interrelationship system between them. Therefore, all the documentation created along a project could be classified in the different areas of the project lifecycle and related to them by this hierarchical structure. Moreover, metadata like identifier, creation date,... have been incorporated to documents in order to be completed and modified by the author to facilitate users’ understanding. Therefore, this ontology is the first step to improve the Document Management Systems in AEC/FM projects and their interoperability limitations.

In this paper, we investigate the problem of decomposing an ontology in Description Logics (DLs) based on graph partitioning algorithms. Also, we focus on syntax features of axioms in a given ontology. Our approach aims at decomposing the ontology into many sub-ontologies that are as distinct as possible. We analyze the algorithms and exploit parameters of partitioning that influence the efficiency of computation and reasoning. These parameters are the number of concepts and roles shared by a pair of sub-ontologies, the size (the number of axioms) of each sub-ontology, and the topology of decomposition. We provide two concrete approaches for automatically decomposing the ontology, one is called partitioning based on minimal separator, and the other is segmenting based on eigenvectors and eigenvalues.