Preserving Virtual Engineering Knowledge Through the Product Life Cycle

Abstract

Virtual engineering applications (VEA) are used through the whole product life cycle (PLC) process; their complexity and pervasiveness make them an ideal scenario for development and testing of software engineering innovations. More precisely, VEAs have problems when they need to share their specific knowledge. They suffer semantic loss situations, and they hardly use any semantic tools. This work proposes a new approach to solving these kinds of problems based on semantic technologies, allowing the seamless sharing of information and knowledge between VEAs involved in a PLC scenario. This approach is validated through a plant layout design application, where several VEA can cooperate and share their knowledge, accomplishing the design task.