Toward the application of case based reasoning to decision-making in concurrent product development(concurrent engineering)

摘要

This paper describes the development and application of case based reasoning (CBR) to provide decision support for project managers and engineers during the early phases of new product development in a concurrent engineering (CE) environment. The paper discusses the reasons for using CBR, focussing on issues such as case collection, maintenance, terminology, adaptation, and similarity; and how the final system could contribute towards achieving a CE conductive culture. The main issues in using CBR in a CE environment, that is characterised by ill defined and ill structured information during early phases of product development, are textual consistency of terminology, validity of cases similarity, and the difficulty in automating case evaluation and adaptation.