A RFBSE model for capturing engineers’ useful knowledge and experience during the design process

Reuse of designers’ knowledge and experience of solving problems during the engineering design process holds the key to increase efficiency of decision making in future projects. An important part of this useful knowledge and experience is the interpretation of data and information about design objects and processes as well as the generation of new information for decision-making. However, previous studies on knowledge representation models have mainly focused on developing a structure to describe the knowledge about design objects and design processes while a systematic method that can effectively integrate knowledge about design objects and knowledge about problem-solving strategies is still missing. To fill this gap, a RFBSE knowledge representation model for capturing useful design knowledge and experience for future reuse is developed and evaluated in this study. This paper describes the key elements of this model, explains the rationale of using particular elements, and discusses the evaluation of the model using an engineering design example.