A knowledge model for automotive engineering design

Within the competitive environment of the automotive industry, increasing the efficiency of the engineering design process and shortening the time to market of a product becomes a key to the success of an automotive firm. Apart from applying design tools and strategies, undertaking knowledge management is also of significant importance as there are always huge amount of data and information generated during a design project. This has driven researchers to study knowledge management and devise a knowledge management system to assist the engineering design process. This paper is based on the study of a Formula Student racing car design project and presents a development of a Project-Process-Product (P3) Model as the core of a knowledge management system. The P3 Model aims to identify the information structure of automotive design knowledge as well as exploring the way to organize the data and information generated during an automotive design project. The preliminary work shows that, the model helps designers, especially novices, gain a clear overview of the project and recognise what data and information may be required for their design as well as how to access the information when necessary.