Manufacturing knowledge reuse for product design

In today’s world there is ever increasing pressure to bring products to market in a quicker and more time-ly fashion that fulfill customers’ needs and are delivered on budget. One way to aid such acceleration of the design and development process is to effectively share and reuse manufacturing knowledge in an ef-fort to bring about product based interoperability. This paper reports upon the work being carried out in the SAMULET research programme that addresses such factors. It focuses upon (i) how the sources of in-formation and knowledge were recognized, (ii) the definition and categorisation of knowledge and (iii) the potential routes for the reuse of manufacturing knowledge. The research approach is currently being developed to help augment a supportive information and knowledge sharing environment and bring about a more integrated development process within a high tech aerospace company.