Knowledge Capturing and Reuse to Support Manufacturing of Customised Products: A Case Study from the Mould Making Industry

Manufacturing activities are characterised by high repetitiveness and the generation of vast amounts of data, which however remain underutilised and in most cases completely unexploited. However, new design and planning projects share numerous commonalities in their processes, materials and resources with past cases. Leveraging information, which is created and distributed among workers, departments and partners of a company through its transformation into knowledge can enable the coordination between the phases of product design and manufacturing, especially in the context of engineered-to-order products. Knowledge intensive industrial sectors that manufacture one-of-a-kind products or several product variants, such as the mould-making, can benefit from the reutilisation of past knowledge. This research work aims to the systematic capturing, storage and retrieval of knowledge about engineering projects and enable its reuse in the design and planning phases. The case-based data model, the components of the knowledge reuse engine and a set of knowledge enriched apps are presented. The application of the framework is demonstrated through a real-life case study with data coming from the mould making industry.