Characterizing situation of knowledge reuse during the engineering design process

Abstract

Consulta en la Biblioteca ETSI Industriales (Riunet)

[EN] Over the last decades, many companies have been struggling with the reuse of engineering design knowledge. (Majchrzak, Cooper et al. 2004) define knowledge reuse as the process by which an entity is able to locate and use shared knowledge. Reusing the knowledge gained with every design in the future designs is beneficial because it can avoid repeating same mistakes and reinventing the wheel. Most of the previous studies in knowledge management concentrate their work on the collection, storage and transfer of knowledge. Therefore, knowledge reuse remains a relatively unexplored field. However, more research is being published in the recent years. This means that the scientific community is becoming aware of the importance of this field of study. This thesis is a part of a PhD developed by the tutor of the thesis. Its main research question is: How can a support to reuse knowledge from repositories during the process of engineering design look like? For achieving this objective, the PhD has been divided in three research questions (RQ):  RQ1: What influences designers to reuse to reuse knowledge form repositories?  RQ2: How can existing situations of knowledge reuse be systematically characterized?  RQ3: What is the relevant knowledge for designers in each situation? The goal of this thesis is to answer the RQ2. Therefore, the main objective of the thesis is to define all possible situations to reuse knowledge during product design. For better understanding Figure 1-1, shows where is include the focus of this thesis in the PhD.