Integrating design resources and knowledge management to support concurrent new product development

Following the “ learning organisations ” trend, many organisations are embracing knowledge management to capture and store all organisational knowledge ranging from informal to formal knowledge. Many commercial knowledge management tools are now available to enable the capture, storage, management and access of organisational memory by members to facilitate and enhance their day-to-day job and activities ( Boothroyd 1999 ). In practice, knowledge has to be modelled, structured, interlinked and maintained to support its flexible integration and its personalised presentation to users. In view of, the rapidly growing number of pages companies have stored in their own Intranets alone, renders the work of finding, creating and maintaining information a time consuming task. Recent research in digital library and semantic web is now finding its way to providing advanced methods for knowledge management. In this paper, we describe our research into software supports for business systems, processes and knowledge evolution. The paper will start by a brief introduction of knowledge management, and then describe our modelling approach together with the developed software architecture. The latter will be illustrated using an industrial distributed design scenario. Finally, the paper will present the general conclusions and statement for further works.