Knowledge-Based Approach to Facilitate Engineering Design

A knowledge-based approach is presented to facilitate the engineering design process relating to spacecraft. The degree of collaboration across temporal and spatial boundaries plays a major role in determining the aggregate time and cost involved in each instance of spacecraft design. A major aspect of such collaboration is the issue of communications: the ability to capture the detailed needs of every stakeholder in the process, as well as rationale for the major design decisions. The approach described provides a framework for facilitating the decision making process in engineering design, by eliciting and capturing the goals and requirements of every stakeholder in the design process through utility and expense functions. An interactive system has been designed that incorporates a four-faceted knowledge-based framework of knowledge acquisition, knowledge discovery, knowledge management, and knowledge dissemination. We describe the combination of the multi-attribute interview software tool MIST and Space Systems Policy Architecture and Research Consortium (SSPARCy) paradigms to develop an evolving knowledge repository that enables one to perform crucial applications whose success is today contingent on geographical proximity. The proposed knowledge-based approach can be readily adopted to facilitate other applications that involve sustained collaboration across geographic and corporate boundaries.