A Decision System to Support Product Development

In recent times, the development and manufacture of new products and the necessary tools required to carry out such activities has resulted in vast amounts of knowledge and information being generated. In order to support product development, there is a requirement to capture the knowledge of the manufacturing processes within the organization, which includes the process, materials, resource, design rules, capacity and other constraints that may limit the capabilities of the organization. This book proposes a decision system to support product development. This includes a knowledge based system which identifies, captures, formalizes, and utilizes knowledge within a product development. The outcome is an effective decision support providing information and knowledge in the place, time and format required, thus ultimately reducing product development costs and improving quality. This book will be useful to both academic researchers and industry practitioners who would need to continuously refer to a knowledge base to enable effective decision making in a production environment.