Knowledge representation, retrieval and reuse for product family design: An anti-logicist approach

•An approach for the representation, the retrieval and the reuse of design knowledge for product families design is proposed.•All methods in literature rely on (at least) a partial representation based on natural language.•The relation between the natural language and the ambiguity of the retrieval (and the consequent reuse) is highlighted.•An anti-logicist approach to unambiguously represent the design knowledge.•The impacts on the ambiguity of the retrieval and the reuse for the product family design are tested on an industrial case. The product family design is a design approach to meet the demand of customisable products. This paper deals with the knowledge representation, retrieval and reuse supporting the design stage of product families. Usually, the methods in the literature do not focus on the retrieve and the reusability of the knowledge. In other words, they do not ensure if a non-expert user can effectively retrieve and reuse the represented knowledge. To cope with this point, here, the aim is to apply an anti-logicist approach for the unambiguous design-knowledge representation to support the unambiguous retrieval and the automatic reuse of the knowledge during a product family design stage. The retrieval is unambiguous because the link between the knowledge models and the requirements is based on a syntax comparison, e.g. intervals of numbers, units of measure. An algorithm for the automatic reuse has been developed: provided an unambiguous definition of the new requirements related to the product family, the algorithm’s outputs are the functional and physical definitions of all the products included in the product families, i.e. performances and CAD files. The case study is a family of components of the HVAC (heating, ventilating and air-conditioning) systems sector. Finally the advantages and issues of a potential industrial implementation are discussed.