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Byline: David Baxter, Rajkumar Roy, James Gao This paper examines the literature relating to manufacturing knowledge and describes how it contributes to the manufacturing enterprise. The review shows that there is a strong emphasis on design in the manufacturing knowledge research domain, and that detailed design is the main focus for current research. An analysis is carried out according to publication date and consequently trends are identified. The design focus is increasing, and the trends show that the domain is driven by industrial applications. The contribution to fundamental research in areas such as knowledge modelling is increasing. Areas that currently have little work in this domain include conceptual design and service.

From product maintenance and service point of view, high-value sophisticated computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools in modern manufacturing factories play important roles: they are manufacturing equipment, and on the other hand, they are also products supplied by equipment manufacturers. There is a trend that manufacturers are extending their responsibilities to the products use phase to meet customers' requirements for lifetime support and service. To ensure the effective performance and efficient maintenance of high-value machine tools, information and knowledge from their lifecycle should be collected and reused. However, in the research area of product service systems and related computerised maintenance systems, there is a lack of research work on how to integrate knowledge from different stakeholders into the maintenance and service planning process, which is important for modern digital manufacturing systems to reduce machine tools' downtime and improve their working performance. This project proposed a collaborative maintenance planning framework to connect different stakeholders and integrate their knowledge into the maintenance and service process. The potential of advanced content management systems (CMSs), which are widely used non-engineering sectors such as finance, business, publishing and government organisations, has been explored and tested for applications in the manufacturing engineering domain. The research realised that CMSs have several advantages compared with traditional engineering information systems, especially in managing dynamic and unstructured knowledge. A prototype maintenance and service planning system has been developed and evaluated using a real CNC machine tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a framework for knowledge reuse in a product-service systems design scenario. The project aim is to develop a methodology to capture, represent and reuse knowledge to support product development in a collaborative enterprise context. The three core elements are: design knowledge, manufacturing capability knowledge, and service knowledge. There are three principal components of the proposed methodology. The first is a process based design model: defining design according to specific tasks, and associating previous knowledge with those tasks. The second is manufacturing capability knowledge: supporting feature based design and manufacture through representing machining features, best practices in machining and inspection, and machining capability. The third component is service knowledge: ensuring that design takes account of the service requirement. The developing paradigm of product-service systems and the requirement for co-design of products and services has influenced the structure of the knowledge base, as well as outlining specific service related requirements. This paper presents the proposed knowledge base structure along with a detailed case study in which the proposal was developed and validated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a generic library of problem-solving methods for scheduling applications. Although some attempts have been made in the past at developing the libraries of scheduling problem-solvers, these only provide limited coverage. Many lack generality, as they subscribe to a particular scheduling domain. Others simply implement a particular problem-solving technique, which may be applicable only to a subset of the space of scheduling problems. In addition, most of these libraries fail to provide the required degree of depth and precision. In our approach, we subscribe to the Task-Method-Domain-Application knowledge modeling framework which provides a structured organization for the different components of the library. At the task level, we construct a generic scheduling task ontology to formalize the space of scheduling problems. At the method level, we construct a generic problem-solving model of scheduling that generalizes from the variety of approaches to scheduling problem-solving, which can be found in the literature. The generic nature of this model is demonstrated by constructing seven methods for scheduling as an alternative specialization of the model. Finally, we validated our library on a number of applications to demonstrate its generic nature and effective support for developing scheduling applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]