Collaborative Reasoning of Design Knowledge with a Hypemetwork Model

The development of complex products entails the collaborative work of a multidisciplinary team and thus raises the need of effectively supporting knowledge creation and sharing in a collaborative and integrated working environment. A design knowledge model based on hypernetwork is proposed in this paper to facilitate knowledge management and collaborative reasoning in the design and development process. Specifically, the knowledge hypernetwork model is constructed with a designer network, a product network, an issue network and a knowledge unit network. The relationships between various nodes from different networks are identified and defined according to the node properties. On this basis, several topological characteristics of hypernetwork are analyzed and some statistical indicators of the design knowledge hypernetwork are defined. The Bayesian approach is applied to conduct the collaborative reasoning process whereby relevant knowledge units for different design entities are recommended according to the current design tasks and the issues to be resolved. A prototype system is developed and the BIW design case validate the effectiveness of the proposed hypernetwork-based model.