Distributed knowledge sharing for collaborative product development

Abstract

Product development is a knowledge-intensive activity in manufacturing enterprises. This paper analyses various forms of knowledge resources in the product development process and studies the representation scheme for them. Then a novel distributed knowledge sharing model is proposed for spreading and sharing knowledge among engineers in collaborative product development teams. In a collaborative team, engineers usually come from diverse disciplines; their demands for knowledge are also different from each other. The proposed knowledge sharing model could deliver the proper knowledge to the engineers who may need them. Moreover, our model is based on the engineers’ personal knowledge repositories rather than the centralised team knowledge repository in the collaborative team. The proposed model could bring out an efficient and proactive way for knowledge sharing among engineers in the product development process. The efficiency and usability of the proposed model are validated by experiments referring to the knowledge sharing in a real-world collaborative team of a manufacturing enterprise.

Keywords:

• knowledge management
• knowledge sharing
• product development
• collaborative design

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions which have helped to improve this paper. This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 70971085).